We’ve had month over month increase of 200+ in engaged contacts on our blog subscriber email list for the past 18 months, and then at the end of July, a sudden drop of over 600 engaged contacts.
This did not happen last summer for reference.
Is there a change in the criteria of engaged/unengaged contacts? What other reason could this be?
Hi @LDewit
The criteria has been like this, for as long as I can remember. Could you clarify what you mean by “drop in engaged” contacts - is this in relation to particular email stats, or have you seen a growing number of unengaged contacts?
Few questions I would have about your email behaviour:
Generally speaking, depending on the size and age of your distribution list and your emails sending frequency, it is not unusual to see a spike in unengaged contacts from one month to another. If I send you the 11th email that you ignore, you will be marked as unengaged - if a few 100 contacts received their 11th email in July, they will be marked as unengaged in July.
I hope that helps.
Frank
Personally speaking I would disable the engaged contacts feature. With all of the privacy features that have been rolled out over the last few years, having this feature turned on can impact your overall reach and deliverability by allowing the system to determine whether someone is still engaged. Because of these features opens/clicks/etc are not tracked accurately which can lead to odd behaviors in your engaged contacts rate.
Hi Frank,
Thank you for your response. Here are the numbers of engaged blog subscribers over the last 6 months (the number is pulled on the 1st of the following month by going into an email draft, preparing to send an email to our blog subscribers, and checking the “don’t send to unengaged contact” box) to give you a snapshot of what we’re seeing.
- Feb: 4,326 estimated recipients
- Mar: 4,454
- Apr: 4,650
- May: 4,861
- Jun: 5,103
- Jul: 4,517
Any additional insights based off that information?
@LDewit wrote:
Hi Frank,
Thank you for your response. Here are the numbers of engaged blog subscribers over the last 6 months (the number is pulled on the 1st of the following month by going into an email draft, preparing to send an email to our blog subscribers, and checking the “don’t send to unengaged contact” box) to give you a snapshot of what we’re seeing.
- Feb: 4,326 estimated recipients
- Mar: 4,454
- Apr: 4,650
- May: 4,861
- Jun: 5,103
- Jul: 4,517
- We email our blog subscribers 2-6 times a month depending on the number of blogs we publish that month
- The total number on the list is 8,553
- Average open rate is ~43%; average CTR is ~10%
- Our Hubspot email health score is: 8
Any additional insights based off that information?
Open rates and CTRs will always be inflated with using send to engaged contacts. That is part of the purpose is to raise your numbers. Over time though your list can fluctuate and needs to be re-activated with email sends to non-engaged contacts.
To stay engaged a person must be engaged within your first 11 sends, or have engagement 1x every 16 sends. If we average your sends to 4 sends per month, the subscribers you are potentially losing are from 3-4 months ago (Apr-May timeframe). Based on what I am seeing, you didn’t go below the March number, so most that you added since then were not engaging and have been removed by the system.
Understand graymail and avoid sending email to unengaged contacts.