Table of Contents
Key Terms
Email Engagement: Any meaningful action showing an email recipient responds positiaely to content, such as opens, clicks, forwards, or time spent reading.
Open Rate: The percentage of recipients who open an email out of total recipients, indicating subject line effectiveness.
Click-Through Rate (CTR): The percentage of recipients who click a link in your email, showing content relevance and offer appeal.
Conversion Rate: The percentage of email recipients who complete a desired action like making a purchase or filling out a form.
If you want to succeed in email marketing, you need to study, analyze, and improve your email engagement. Engaged recipients are much more likely to take revenue-generating actions than unengaged recipients.
Short Answer: Measure email engagement through open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and time spent reading. Improve it by writing better subject lines, targeting niche demographics, eliminating fluff, and optimizing send timing.
What Is Email Engagement?
Quick Answer: Email engagement is any meaningful action showing a recipient responds positively to your content—opens, clicks, forwards, shares, or extended time reading.
Email engagement could be an email open, showing the subject line was compelling enough to warrant attention. It could be a click-through, indicating interest in a product or content advertised in the email body.
Sometimes engagement refers to a relative level of interest. A user who spends 2 minutes reading your email is more engaged than someone who spends 5 seconds on it.
Engagements are a critical source of information about your email marketing campaign. You can measure engagements to optimize your campaign—if one type of content generates more engagements, prioritize it in future campaigns. To help quantify results and plan improvements, tools referenced in this article by ZenBusiness can be useful when modeling targets and performance.
What Are the Key Email Engagement Metrics?
Quick Answer: Key metrics include open rate, click-through rate, click-to-open ratio, time spent reading, bounce rate, conversion rate, spam flags, unsubscribe rate, forwards, and social shares.
Using most email marketing tools, you can measure the following metrics:
1. Open Rate
The number of people who opened an email out of its total recipients. Recipients see your subject line and sender, then decide whether to open. If they open it, you’ve succeeded in piquing their interest.
2. Click-Through Rate (CTR)
The number of people clicking links in your email compared to total recipients or total opens. It’s a sign that your content offers value or intrigue.
3. Click-to-Open Ratio
The number of people who click links compared to people who open the email. A low click-to-open ratio means you have a compelling subject line but not enough follow-through in the body content.
4. Time Spent on Email/Page
Measure time prospects spend on your email and, if they click through, on each page. Extended time usually means people are reading your material. Low time indicates you need to find ways to improve content.
5. Bounce Rate (After Visiting)
Bounce rate measures how many visitors leave a page before visiting another page on your site. Lower bounce rate generally indicates more engaging content. Note that email bounce rate is different—it measures emails that never reached recipients.
6. Conversion Rate
Measure how many email visitors purchase products or fill out forms using Google Analytics or a similar analytics platform. Conversion rate is a byproduct of engagement level, offer strength, and content quality.
7. Spam Flags
When subscribers flag your emails as spam, it means you’ve sent too many low-quality emails or your content isn’t providing enough value.
8. Unsubscribe Rate
Less severe than spam flags, people unsubscribe when messages feel repetitive, not valuable, or unengaging. High unsubscribe rates signal you need to improve content quality.
9. Forwards
Forwards are a very good sign. Your email reaches new people with no effort or cost on your part. It means someone found your content so engaging they shared it with their contacts.
Social shares indicate someone found your email engaging enough to share with friends and family. It also increases content visibility to more people.
11. Subjective Surveys
Occasionally send surveys to subscribers requesting feedback on your messages. Ask what they like and don’t like, whether they’ve engaged in the past, and what they’d like to see in the future.
What Variables Affect Email Engagement Measurement?
Quick Answer: Consider recipient devices, days and times sent, and domain-based engagement when analyzing metrics to identify patterns and optimization opportunities.
12. Recipient Devices
Engagement rates may vary by device. If desktop users are more engaged than mobile users, it’s usually a design problem. Optimize emails to be mobile-responsive so they display properly across any device.
13. Days and Times
Engagement rates vary by day of week and time of day. You may find engagements spike on Fridays or peak early in the morning. Use this data to optimize send timing.
14. Domain-Based Engagement
Measure engagements by domain, which is valuable for targeting big-name clients or looking for leads. It provides clues about which demographics engage most with your content.
How Do You Improve Email Engagement?
Quick Answer: Write better subject lines, make sharing easy, target niche demographics, eliminate fluff, prioritize best content, optimize timing, and vary email types.
Learn from both successful and unsuccessful elements in previous emails. Replicate what works and omit what doesn’t.
15. Write a Better Subject Line
Your subject line should be your top priority. If it isn’t engaging, recipients never see the rest of your content. Subject lines need to be short, compelling, intriguing, and relevant. For help, see subject lines for networking emails.
People won’t share content unless it’s easy. Include convenient links and buttons for sharing. You can also include a shareable QR code so readers can copy or download it.
17. Cater to a Niche Demographic
Focus on specific, niche demographics rather than creating content for wide audiences. Get to know your audience, create segmented lists for each customer sub-type, and send different email types to each one.
18. Eliminate the Fluff
Structure your entire email around one engagement goal. If you want people to click links and buy products, don’t bog down the email with a dozen other CTAs. One key idea or objective per email is more engaging than diluted multiple offers.
19. Prioritize Your Best Content
Track the performance of your content—email content, blog posts, and anything in your content marketing wheelhouse. When certain subjects or archetypes perform better, prioritize them in future emails.
20. Master the Art of Timing
After a few months of emailing, you’ll have data on the best times and days to send emails. Selectively send emails when they’re likely to be better received for far better engagement rates.
21. Vary Your Email Types
Use multiple email archetypes: welcome emails, special offer emails, follow-up emails, and drip emails sent based on customer triggers. Multiple angles for engagement let you experiment with different tactics.
How Do You Track Email Engagement Metrics?
Quick Answer: Use email marketing platforms for open and click rates, Google Analytics for on-site behavior, and tools like EmailAnalytics for team email activity patterns.
EmailAnalytics helps you visualize email activity—either for marketing or organizational purposes. See how many emails you send and receive every day, top senders and recipients, average email response time, and busiest times of day and days of week.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a good email open rate?
Average open rates vary by industry, but generally 15-25% is considered acceptable, while above 25% is good. B2B emails often see lower open rates than B2C. Focus on improving your own benchmarks rather than comparing to industry averages.
What is a good email click-through rate?
Average click-through rates range from 2-5%. Rates above 5% are considered strong. Click-through rate depends heavily on your offer, audience targeting, and how well email content aligns with recipient expectations.
How do you calculate click-to-open rate?
Divide the number of unique clicks by the number of unique opens, then multiply by 100. For example, if 100 people opened your email and 20 clicked a link, your click-to-open rate is 20%. This measures how well your email content delivers on your subject line’s promise.
Why is my email engagement dropping?
Common causes include sending too frequently, irrelevant content, poor subject lines, list decay (outdated addresses), deliverability issues, or design problems on mobile devices. Review recent changes and analyze which metrics dropped to identify the cause.
What is the best time to send marketing emails?
Best send times vary by audience. Generally, Tuesday through Thursday mornings (9-11 AM) perform well for B2B emails. However, analyze your own data to find when your specific audience engages most, as optimal timing differs by industry and demographic.
How do you re-engage inactive email subscribers?
Send a re-engagement campaign with a compelling subject line acknowledging the lapse. Offer something valuable, ask for feedback, or give them an easy way to update preferences. If they still don’t engage, consider removing them to improve list health.
Jayson is a long-time columnist for Forbes, Entrepreneur, BusinessInsider, Inc.com, and various other major media publications, where he has authored over 1,000 articles since 2012, covering technology, marketing, and entrepreneurship. He keynoted the 2013 MarketingProfs University, and won the “Entrepreneur Blogger of the Year” award in 2015 from the Oxford Center for Entrepreneurs. In 2010, he founded a marketing agency that appeared on the Inc. 5000 before selling it in January of 2019, and he is now the CEO of EmailAnalytics and OutreachBloom.
