An unengaged contact is someone who doesn’t interact with your emails or links over a period of time. For example, a contact might be considered unengaged if they:
- Haven’t interacted with any of your marketing emails
- Haven’t interacted with the last 11 or 16 emails you’ve sent them
- Haven’t opened an email or clicked a link in a certain amount of time
The amount of time and the number of emails will depend entirely upon the CRM you are using.
That means that the unengaged people on any contact list will not receive marketing email. Transactional emails will still be delivered but be careful of abusing this option.
Looking at a few of the ‘major players’ in the CRM world, this is what we found:
Hubspot unengaged contacts
A contact will be categorized as unengaged if they meet one of the following criteria: Never engaged with a marketing email from you and hasn’t engaged with the last 11 emails you’ve sent them. Previously engaged with one of your marketing emails but haven’t engaged with the last 16 emails you’ve sent them.
Keap unengaged contacts
An unengaged contact is an email address that has not engaged with marketing efforts within the last four months. Engagement is defined as opening an email, clicking a link in an email, or submitting a landing page or web form.
Constant Contact unengaged contacts
An unengaged contact is someone who has an engagement score of 0 or has not engaged with an email, form, or IMAP-synced mailbox in 24 months.
That’s just a small sampling but it gives you an idea of what email marketers are dealing with when sending email. For some CRMs it’s a pretty small window. Either way, it is something that marketers need to keep an eye on.
How do we keep people engaged?
The goal here should be to keep people engaged and keep them off the unengaged contact list. That’s not always as easy as it seems even when your information is super valuable, not spammy, etc. There are a few things to consider when sending out email:
Engaging subject line
SO important. That’s the first attempt to get the readers attention and it has to be compelling. Think of all of the email you receive on a daily basis… what makes you click?
There’s a nice tool that you can use to check your subject lines at CoSchedule. Test it out and see if it helps your open rates. NOTE: If people open the email they are engaged (GOOD!).
Quality content
Keep your ‘ask to give’ ratio low, which means don’t oversell to your list. Overselling is a major issue and will ‘wear out’ your list making it completely lose it’s value.
Email frequency
Don’t email your list constantly – but also, don’t leave the list alone for months and then expect to pick it right back up. The key is to find the right balance and that can be difficult. It also can depend upon your niche and your authority in that niche.
Monitor email stats
A good way to keep an eye on unengaged contacts (because ultimately we don’t want our list to HAVE unengaged contacts) is to closely monitor your email stats. The top ones to watch are:
- Open rate
- Click to open rate
- Click through rate
Here are some example stats in the finance niche:
- Open rate average = 27.1%
- Click to open rate average = 10.1%
- Click through rate average = 2.4%
Engagement, unengaged contacts and business success
If you rely on email marketing, engagement is HUGE (right behind having quality leads on your list, but that’s another post entirely). The idea is to monitor your email campaigns, see what works and what doesn’t work and modify accordingly. Contact me today for a f-r-e-e chat about how you can improve your email marketing.
