The Real Heirarchy of Email Engagement
Email marketers sure love a good metric, but true email engagement can’t be measured in a simple “engaged/disengaged” binary.
I am calling upon Email Service Providers to break down their engagement reports into the proper categories:
- This person subscribed to get some freebie you were offering, and instantly marks your email as spam once it arrives.
- Same as above, but they merely unsubscribe instantly and then email you to let you know.
- Subscribes, immediately forgets about doing so, and then threatens to “contact my lawyer” when you email them exactly what they signed up for.
- Subscribes, but literally never opens a single email you send.
- Only opens emails if they have more than two exclamation points in the subject line.
- Never opens any emails except for the “we’re going to unsubscribe you if you don’t engage” email.
- A fellow marketer who doesn’t really care about your email but knows email metrics and gives you pity clicks.
- Genuine subscriber who opens your emails and will sometimes click through.
- The completionist who will open every email even though they never read anything.
- The super-engaged subscriber who turns out to actually be a piece of anti-malware software auto-clicking everything.
- The super fan who tweets out links from every email.
- The super hater who also tweets out links from every email, but, like, sarcastically.
- The nitpicker who will let you know about a typo within 25 second of you hitting send.
I am available for consulting work on implementing this scale.
May 10, 2020