Marketers, listen up! A new study from Litmus is shedding light on the challenge of email engagement, and, perhaps, the mystery of why your emails are not being seen.
According to Litmus’ research, 18% of U.S. online consumers say that they never open email from companies. This non-engagement has influenced the way ISPs deliver and sort emails to users. For most ISPs, low open and low click through rates can result in a business’ emails being sorted into the spam or junk folder. But some ISPs have become even more aggressive with their sorting tactics.
Gmail’s Priority Inbox learns how to sort emails based on user behavior. It identified important emails based on what a user has read, replied to and marked important themself. Gmail also uses subscriber engagement to tag the order of importance.
Even Hotmail is making it harder for brand emails to be seen. Hotmail measures subscriber engagement by four factors to determine delivery:
- Messages read, then deleted by user
- Messages deleted without being read
- Messages users replied to
- Frequency of reading and receiving a message from particular contacts
Although these can be difficult hurdles to cross in delivering your message to consumers, there are a few simple steps you can take to help offset them. Asking subscribers to add your address to their contacts list helps show engagement to ISPs, and giving implement preferences and frequency options to subscribers from the beginning is a proactive way to keep users from unsubscribing (especially since 54% of consumers unsubscribe from emails because they come too frequently).
Looking for some email marketing inspiration? Check out these four awesomely undeniable signup boxes.
