Getting better email results isn’t just about sending more mail; it’s making sure you’re sending the right mail to the right audience. One often underused tool that can help improve your deliverability, address inbox placement issues over time, and strengthen your metrics is engagement filtering.
Here, we’ll be going over the basics of engagement filtering, including what it is, how it’s used, and a few practical examples.
What is engagement filtering?
Engagement filtering means limiting your newsletter or promotional sends to new sign-ups and recipients that have recently engaged positively with your mail.
Mailbox providers use engagement signals to as one of several factors that determine your sender reputation. When recipients consistently open and click mail, they send more positive signals. This results in better reputation, which leads to the inbox.
Why engagement filtering matters
There are several practical reasons to start using engagement filtering aside from just improving your open and click rates.
Stronger inbox placement
Higher engagement levels show mailbox providers that your mail is relevant and, more importantly, wanted. Over time, this can help improve your inbox placement.
For publishers, stronger inbox placement translates directly into higher traffic, more sponsored impressions, and improved subscription performance. Protecting inbox placement protects the value of your audience.
Fewer spam complaints
Google and Yahoo’s recent sender guidelines updates caused a shift in how senders viewed the importance of spam complaints; they added an average complaint threshold of 0.3%. Publishers that routinely went above this would hit the spam folder or, in more severe cases, be blocked outright.
When a recipient continues to receive mail they’re not engaging with, they’re far more likely to mark mail as spam. If they do, that hurts your reputation with mailbox providers. Engagement filters help with this by making sure you’re only targeting users that are positively interacting with your mail.
Reduced risk of spam traps and blocklisting
We’ll cover Spam Traps in a future article, but in short, Spam Traps are booby-trapped or abandoned email addresses designed to catch senders who either send unsolicited mail, or continue to target recipients when they don’t engage with mail.
These can lead to blocklisting, including Spamhaus listings. Engagement filtering helps reduce this risk by removing inactive recipients from regular sends.
When and where do you use Engagement Filtering?
Engagement filtering should be applied to any non-transactional mail, including:
- Newsletters
- Promotional campaigns
- Marketing material
Truly transactional mail like password resets, invoices, and account updates don’t need any engagement filtering. The same goes for any legally required mail, just make sure there’s no marketing content in your transactional mail.
Example Engagement Filters
Below we’ve got two examples of engagement filters you can use on your mail.
Strict Filtering
Best suited for daily or high frequency newsletter publishers who want to protect inbox placement across large audience segments.
- New sign-ups within 14 days of joining.
- Existing recipients that have opened a mail in the last 90 days.
- Existing recipients that have clicked a mail in the last 120 days.
Loose Filtering
Better for publishers who send less frequently or have a longer contact life cycle.
- New sign-ups within 30 days of joining.
- Existing recipients that have opened a mail in the last 180 days.
- Existing recipients that have clicked a mail in the last 365 days.
While these are guidelines, you can experiment with these and find what’s best for you and your mail. There are no fixed rules to how far you can go with engagement filters but try to avoid contacting users that haven’t opened or clicked in over a year.
Getting started with engagement filters
If you’re not currently using engagement filtering, start small. Apply a loose filter to your next campaign and monitor your results; small changes can lead to big improvements in deliverability over time!