The word “engagement” can mean a lot of things. It may be a fancy word you use to spice up various dental and doctor’s appointments. It may mean you’re about to get married (hey, congratulations! Time to celebrate). 💍When it comes to email, however, “engagement” generally means one thing: how your recipients are responding to your messages. And you hope they’re not responding like Ron Swanson.

Strategic email engagement is pretty important—It’s a given that the major ISPs use some form of engagement filtering to gauge email deliverability and decide which messages land in their users’ inboxes. While ISPs use many different engagement tools and ‘signal’ catchers to figure out where to send each message, one of the largest factors in their decision is how your recipients are responding to your emails. Do they want them? Are they responding at all? To maximize your deliverability, you’ll want to ensure your messages are getting a good response, and that you’re taking advantage of that response. This is where strategic engagement comes in. How do you utilize strategic engagement with your customers? Let's take a look.

What is strategic engagement?

Strategic engagement basically means minimizing the impact of non-engagers by sending them less email (or not sending them email at all), and maximizing the recipients that are evangelizing your campaigns or brand. For example, this may mean using sunset policies on non-engaged users, or signal boosters on more engaged ones (more on those below).

Strategic engagement is a great way to take advantage of ISPs’ engagement filtering. Engagement filtering, put simply, means that the more recipients engage with your email, the more your messages will find their way to the inbox, not the spam folder. With this context, a savvy email marketer can look to both maximize and minimize how their recipients are, or are not, engaging with their email.

Maintaining consistent engagement rates in your email program

With the reality that ISPs are tracking engagement as a major factor in predictable inboxing, it will always be necessary to ensure you are maintaining consistent engagement rates relative to your email volume. Increasing email volume without ensuring your open rates stay the same or rise means that you will experience a downturn in inboxing. By pruning non-engagers with sunset policies and signal boosting to your promoters, you will ensure that engagement rate stays even (or even goes up!) as you increase volume. 💪 Both sunsetting and signal boosting depend on segmenting your list and tracking open rates, click-throughs, and more to see which subscribers are actively engaged. If you’re not keeping track of your email rates, start now!

Ideal email rates vary for everyone, and understanding what is an ideal open rate for you depends on a number of factors including your industry, type of email, and your frequency of send