What email engagement factors are most important for inbox placement?

Key findings

• Replies over clicks: Direct replies are often considered a stronger positive signal than clicks, as they indicate a deeper level of engagement and interest from the recipient. Replies typically add the sender's address to the recipient's address book, which is a powerful signal for future inboxing.
• Negative actions outweigh positives: A high volume of negative engagement (e.g., marking emails as spam, deleting without opening) can significantly damage sender reputation and negate any positive signals from a few engaged users. Understanding email engagement metrics is crucial for monitoring this balance.
• Holistic view of engagement: Mailbox providers assess a wide range of engagement metrics, including opens, reads, glances, skims, deletes, and clicks, as confirmed by providers like Yahoo's Campaign Performance Feed. This comprehensive data allows them to build a detailed picture of sender reputation.
• Content relevance: Engagement is highly tied to the relevance and value of your email content. Personalized and targeted content is more likely to drive positive interactions and improve inbox placement. High engagement typically indicates relevant content reaching the right audience, while low engagement may signal issues with content or targeting.

Key considerations

• Prioritize recipient relevance: Focus on sending valuable, anticipated content to your subscribers. This naturally encourages positive engagement signals like opens, clicks, and replies. Mailjet also emphasizes that improving engagement largely depends on marketers' efforts.
• Monitor diverse metrics: Go beyond simple open and click rates. Pay attention to replies, forwards, and especially spam complaint rates. For more on this, consider reading about best practices for better inbox placement.
• Clean your lists: Regularly remove unengaged subscribers to prevent accumulating negative signals that can drag down your overall sender reputation. A smaller, highly engaged list is far better than a large, unengaged one.
• Encourage replies: Design campaigns that invite recipients to reply, especially for transactional or customer service-oriented emails. Ensure your reply-to addresses are monitored.

Key opinions

• Replies are paramount: Marketers frequently highlight replies as the most powerful engagement signal, often attributing significant weight to them for improving future inboxing by adding the sender to address books.
• Clicks have value, but less visible: While clicks are seen as positive, some marketers believe that mailbox providers might not directly track all clicks in the same way they track replies, though official documentation suggests they do monitor click data.
• Holistic scoring approach: One marketer proposed a scoring system where replies are valued highest, followed by clicks and opens, with spam complaints being the most detrimental. This suggests a nuanced view of engagement impact.
• Relevance drives interaction: There is a strong belief that Google's AI, and presumably other providers, prioritize content that recipients have previously interacted with or find highly relevant, reinforcing the need for targeted content.
• Engagement is not a silver bullet: Despite the power of replies, marketers acknowledge that a few positive interactions cannot fully counteract a large number of unengaged users or spam complaints, emphasizing the need for overall list hygiene.

Key considerations

• Prioritize genuine engagement: Marketers should focus on fostering true interest from recipients, as interested users are more likely to open, read, and reply. This approach naturally leads to better email deliverability and sender score.
• Don't rely solely on replies: While replies are powerful, they are not a magic fix for poor reputation. Marketers must maintain overall list health and minimize negative signals like spam complaints to ensure success.
• Segment for relevance: To improve engagement, segment your audience and tailor content to their specific interests, as relevance is a significant factor in how recipients interact with emails. This is a core part of improving email inbox placement.
• Measure engagement broadly: Utilize all available metrics to understand engagement, including opens, clicks, and, where possible, reads and deletes. This comprehensive view helps identify areas for improvement. Salesloop notes that high engagement indicates relevant content.

Key opinions

• Mailbox providers do see clicks: Contrary to some beliefs, experts confirm that mailbox providers (MBPs) do track clicks, as evidenced by publicly available performance feeds from major providers like Yahoo. This data is incorporated into their algorithms.
• Overall engagement matters most: Individual positive actions, even replies, are less impactful than the collective engagement (or lack thereof) of the entire recipient base. Broad interest and consistent interaction across the list are key positive signals. Maintaining a good email domain reputation relies on this.
• Negative signals are powerful: Spam complaints and emails ignored or deleted without opening carry significant negative weight that can quickly erode sender reputation. These negative signals often outweigh the positive impact of a few replies.
• Consistent positive behavior: Building a healthy sender reputation requires a consistent pattern of positive engagement over time. Isolated bursts of positive interaction are less effective than sustained, positive user behavior.

Key considerations

• Focus on the big picture: Don't get fixated on single metrics like replies. Instead, concentrate on the overall health of your email program, aiming for widespread, consistent positive engagement across your subscriber base.
• Actively manage unengaged subscribers: Proactively identify and segment (or suppress) subscribers who consistently show no engagement. This reduces the negative signals impacting your sender reputation. If your inbox placement is dropping despite engagement, unengaged subscribers may be a cause.
• Understand MBP algorithms: Recognize that mailbox providers use complex algorithms that analyze a multitude of signals, with user interaction being a primary determinant. Technical authentication like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC is foundational, but engagement drives sustained inbox placement.
• Leverage content for engagement: Ensure your content is valuable and relevant to your audience, as this is the most effective way to organically drive positive engagement signals. An understanding of inbox placement starts with this.

Key findings

• Comprehensive metric tracking: Documentation confirms that mailbox providers monitor a wide array of engagement metrics beyond just opens and clicks, including delivers, reads, glances, skims, and deletes, to build a holistic view of sender performance.
• Inbox placement definition: Inbox placement is defined as the ability to get emails into the primary inbox where subscribers are most likely to see and open them, directly linking it to positive user interaction.
• Replies are positive signals: Explicitly stated in some documentation, replies are considered a strong positive engagement signal, contributing favorably to sender reputation determination by inbox providers.
• High engagement, high placement: Documentation directly links high email engagement to higher inbox placement, conversely noting that low engagement may lead to increased filtering by email service providers.

Key considerations

• Review provider feeds: Utilize postmaster tools and performance feeds provided by major mailbox providers, such as Yahoo's Campaign Performance Feed, to directly access metrics that influence your deliverability.
• Focus on content quality: Since inbox placement aims to put emails where they're most likely to be seen and opened, prioritize creating compelling content that encourages positive interactions and avoids spam triggers. This supports fixing emails going to spam.
• Calculate inbox placement rate accurately: Understand the formula for inbox placement rate ([Emails in the inbox ÷ Emails delivered] x 100) and how it's measured through seed mailboxes, as detailed by documentation like Mailjet's. Measuring inbox placement accurately is essential.
• Minimize spam complaints: As negative signals are heavily weighted, implementing strategies to reduce spam complaints, such as clear unsubscribe options and sending only to engaged users, is paramount.