Hopefully you answered YES to this question. If not read on…

There’s a paradigm shift under way that you need to be aware of. Measuring your success, and ultimately the success of your emails reaching your customers’ inboxes, is now becoming less determined by your complaint rates, open rates, and non-existent bounces. The new determinate is called Email Engagement.

Weekly new ways of measuring results pop up, this is the newest. These new metrics include variables such as, “Are the recipients deleting your mail without even reading it,” “How long does the piece of email sit in your subscriber’s inbox before it’s read,” “Are recipients saving your mail once it’s read,” and “Do your subscribers re-read your email.” The old metrics are still being used, but the new measurements of Email Engagement are now being factored into filtering models as a better means to separating the good marketers from the bad ones.

Real evidence of these changes was in late November when AOL announced significant changes to its Enhanced Whitelist policies. This indicates that AOL will give a heavier weight to Email Engagement in the future.

So what does this mean to you? You now need to clean up your subscriber lists and focus on what your subscribers really want. First at the top of your to-do list should be that you must obtain explicit consent from your contacts on your email list(s). You must remove your bounces, segment your list(s) to ensure your messages are truly targeted, and obtain a better understanding of your relationship with your subscribers to insure better engagement. If you don’t do these steps it potentially puts your business’s reputation in the crosshairs of the ISPs.

There is a science to this method of marketing. Keep researching, keep on top of it and if you understand and embrace these new changes, you will reap the rewards.

My Best Regards,
Kathy Kane
Market Insights, LLC