7 ways to measure subscriber engagement

As email marketers we talk a lot about subscriber engagement. Rightly so, without engagement our email list and the commercial value associated with it will gradually wither and die.

But do you really know how engaged your audience is? I believe that working onsubscriber engagement is one of the biggest challenges for email marketing, so I think it’s important to get more granular in reviewing engagement – average open and click rates don’t cut it.

How do you measure subscriber engagement?
A review of campaign open, click-through and conversion rates is a natural place to start to improve engagement with email. Trends in overall response rates are also a good starting point, but a capable email marketing system will give you more insight.

Here are seven ways to achieve a more in-depth analysis of subscriber engagement:

1. Click to open rates
These rates will enable you to see how engaging your creative and offer is. Link tracking or ‘click maps’, which are standard with most systems these days, will show you which placements and which creative elements work best.

2. Open and click-through rates by segment
Engagement will vary by segment depending upon the targeting and relevance of your content or offers, so be sure to assess this. For example, I remember a surf gear brand finding that it was the older age group rather than the key youth demographic that was interacting most with their e-newsletter

3. Open and click-through rates based on delivery time
Time of day and day of the week, or time in month, still make a significant difference to response, so advanced email marketers are moving to target according to time when individual subscribers are most engaged.

4. Engagement at different points in the customer lifecycle
It is natural that engagement will decline through time; subscribers are always most engaged when they first opt in. So you need to work to engage visitors through time, for example through a welcome strategy, or try to reactivate them. Reviewing engagement at different lengths of time from original subscription point can help assess the success of these strategies.

5. Engagement with different types of offer and message
Different types of promotion or message will also vary in popularity, so you need a way of tagging offer types to analyse what is effective. Some email marketers tag specific types of links in different positions in the template to know which part of their template is most effective. For example, there could be a standard link for the hero product or a featured category in an email.

6. Hurdle rates of engagement over a longer period
This assesses engagement over a longer, say six- or nine-month period in order to set goals to review how active your subscribers are measured through open, click or purchase rates.

Some reviews have suggested that if you evaluate clicks or opens over a six-month period around two-thirds of subscribers can be inactive. So, this is the big one! If you have to choose just one strategic measure to assess customer engagement, let this be it!

7. Ask your subscribers!
In digital marketing, I think we tend to rely too much on quantitative techniques since it’s easy to pull this data. But this will only tell us what your subscriber did, not why or how they feel.

And, in the spirit of asking your audience what they think, do let us know your thoughts or share the approaches you use.

Dr Dave Chaffey is CEO and co-founder of Smart Insights

You can find more articles like this from the Email Marketing Council via