When considering how to target your subscribers, you should remember that permission marketing is a two-way relationship. As well as storing their contact details and custom profile fields for information about your subscribers, our system also automatically calculates an engagement score for them depending on how often they open your campaigns and click links. This means you can interact with them based on how they interact with you.
When a subscriber signs up to hear from you through a subscription form, they are given a 3 star rating. From then, their rating is calculated by how they interact. Regularly opening campaigns and clicking links will boost the engagement rating, and very little engagement will mean their rating falls.
Subscribers who have not had a chance to engage with your brand will be unrated - this could be if they are added manually or imported from a CSV file. Targeting 'unrated' subscribers is a good way to 'welcome' subscribers and thank them for giving their details, letting them know what you'll be sending them. Once an unrated subscriber receives their first campaign their engagement will change to 1-star, and they'll go up to the average 3-star rating once they open a campaign.
As you can imagine, subscriber behaviour can vary dramatically and there are a huge number of variables at play in determining how engaged a subscriber is - from the frequency they're sent to, how long they've been a subscriber for, the frequency of their opens or clicks, the number of clicks etc. A subscriber's engagement 'score' changes constantly as time goes on - our highly complex algorithm takes care of judging the rating for you behind the scenes so you don't have to.
By selecting Engagement using our Audience segmentation feature, without disturbing your list setup, you can easily segregate the subscribers who are most interested in giving you a return on investment from those who may be weighing your database down. You can reward your 5-star subscribers with special offers or coupons, try to re-engage with your 1-star subscribers, or find those subscribers you're paying to contact but who aren't paying you any attention, and remove them from your database.
Remember, of course, not to bombard your 5-star subscribers - if you fill up their inboxes, they might become blind to your campaigns or just start deleting them. Remember also not to sideline your 1-star subscribers - find out what they really want to hear about, offer them something to entice them to engage, and hopefully they'll become 5-star subscribers too!
Engagement ratings are a great way to monitor the success of your campaigns over time. If the proportion of your 1 star subscribers is increasing steadily while the proportion of 5 star subscribers drops, you know it's time to review your email marketing strategy and adjust your content, sending pattern and even your subsription forms to improve your relationship with your subscribers. If the proportion of 5 star subscribers is increasing comparatively, you know you're on the right track!