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Facts about engagement

It is reality that ISPs look at the population of recipients that a mail stream is going to.
It is reality that they evaluate the activity of that population.
It is reality that ISPs treat senders that are sending to a significant number of email addresses that have not been logged into or accessed recently negatively.
If you’re having delivery problems, looking at the recipients and their activity is part of troubleshooting the issue and identifying a path back to the inbox.
You can use web and purchase data as a measurement of engagement IF you have, at some point, directly linked the email address and the user.
If you don’t have something that demonstrates a direct link between the person and the address, then it’s a crapshoot as to whether or not that email address belongs to who you think it belongs to.
Happy Friday everyone. It’s been a week.

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Engagement, it's not what you might think

Most delivery experts will tell you that ISPs measure recipient engagement as a part of their delivery. That’s absolutely true, but I think there’s a language difference that makes it hard for senders to understand what we mean by engagement.
ISPs, and other filtering companies, profile their user base. They know, for instance, who logs in and checks mail every day. They know who checks mail every 20 seconds. They know who gets a lot of spam. They know who hasn’t logged in for months. They know who accurately marks mail as spam and who is sloppy with the this-is-spam button. They know if certain recipients get the same mail, it’s likely to be spam.
Engagement at the ISPs is more about the recipient engaging with their email address and the mail in their mailbox then it is about the recipient engaging with specific emails.
 

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Subject lines

There has been a lot of discussion in various places recently about subject line length and how it affects email marketing. There have been multiple studies done on how the subject line affects opens and clicks. (Mailchimp, Alchemy Worx, Mailer Mailer, Adestra). The discussion has even spilled over into Ken Magill’s newsletter today.
I’ve had a couple people ask me my opinion on subject line over the years. My general response is that subject line length is not directly measured by spamfilters and so don’t fret about the length. It is true that consistently crafting poor subject lines can indirectly cause delivery problems. Send mail few people open and that will hurt your reputation over time.
I think Ken really said it best, though.

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