SharpSpring has recently released its email engagement tools and a new contact engagement scoring system to help marketers target engaged recipients and to re-engage with contacts that are at risk of becoming unengaged, or contacts that are already unengaged. This is a move in response to how ISPs are now using engagement as a key metric in determining if your email makes it to the inbox or lands in the spam folder. By only sending to engaged recipients, marketers increase their chances of their email campaigns hitting the inbox of their subscriber base.
By only sending to engaged recipients, marketers increase their chances of their email campaigns hitting the inbox of their subscriber base.
What Counts as Engagement?
SharpSpring’s engagement tools use all aspects of the platform to signify that a contact still wants to hear from you, including:
- When a contact opens an email
- When a contact clicks a link in an email
- When a contact visits a tracked site
- When a contact clicks a Media Center link
As you can see, SharpSpring provides comprehensive measures to ensure any contact that is engaging with you, your emails, your media center assets, or your sites will still be able to receive email from you.
At a Glance – An Infographic Summary
We have summarised how the contact engagement score changes with different activities tracked inside SharpSpring in an infographic below. The subsequent sections describe the information conveyed in this infographic in more details.
Contact Engagement Score
Each contact is given a contact engagement score upon creation. This score has a maximum value of 16 and a minimum value of 0. Contacts created manually, from a form submission, or through the API will be given an initial contact engagement score of 16.
Contacts created through the import tool will be scored based on overall list quality and individual email address quality. This is described in the later section.
Contact Engagement Score Categories
Contact engagement score is divided into three categorizations: Engaged, At Risk and Unengaged. The criteria of these categorizations are defined below.
Engaged
Contact Engagement scores of 5 or greater (with a maximum value of 16). Users can send email to these contacts as normal.
At Risk
Contact engagement scores of 4 or less (not including 0), or after 20 months of not opening an email. Contacts with scores in this range are added to the dynamic list, “At Risk Contacts”.
Users can send email to these contacts as normal, but should consider sending highly engaging content in an attempt to drive clicks/opens.
The At Risk status will be included in the automation engine as well as for list segmentation. You can easily add this attribute as a filter to any of your existing lists or automations to exclude / include all contacts with this status.
When scheduling an email send to a list, there is a checkbox option to “Suppress recipients at risk of unengagement”. When clicked, the at risk contacts will not be included in the send for the email job.
Unengaged
Contact engagement score equal to 0. Contacts with this score are added to a dynamic list, “Unengaged Contacts”. These contacts cannot receive email.
The Unengaged status will be included in the automation engine as well as for list segmentation. You can easily add this attribute as a filter to any of your existing lists or automations to exclude / include all contacts with this status.
What Affects the Contact Engagement Score?
Contact engagement score changes based on the following activity:
- For every email the contact is sent and does not open the score will decrease by 1 point.
- If the contact opens any email, the score will reset to 16.
- If the contact fills out a form, the score will reset to 16.
- If a contact with tracking established is unengaged (score of 0) and visits a tracked site, the score will increase by 6 points.
- If a contact with tracking established is unengaged (score of 0) and clicks a media center link, the score will increase by 6 points.
In addition to the above, if a contact has not opened or clicked any email in 24 months the contact engagement score will immediately set to 0.
What About List Imports?
Contacts created through the import tool will be scored based on the overall list quality and the presence of individual contact’s email address on a third party verification service. These contact engagement scores will vary per contact, scored with a maximum value of 9 and a minimum value of 0.
If equal to or greater than 45% of your list contacts are present on a third party verification service, your list will not import. We have determined these lists would fall into the lowest 2.5% of list quality, and have a high risk of damaging your sender reputation should an email send be attempted.
Parting Notes
By preventing sends to unengaged recipients, SharpSpring is helping to protect your domain reputation and ensure engaged recipients continue receiving your content. Sending to unengaged recipients puts your sender domain at risk of hitting a spam trap, or having ISPs classify your sender domain as a spammer.
If you are encountering any issues or need clarifications to your doubts about this update, please reach out to your assigned account manager or project manager.