Email engagement

What it means

Mailbox providers see what senders cannot: whether people read, reply, move messages out of spam or ignore them. Google's Postmaster Tools gives deliverability recommendations when recipients indicate they did not open or interact with a sender's mail, or that they want more of it. Yahoo warns that sending to users who are not reading your mail, or who report it as spam, harms delivery and reputation, and Apple asks bulk senders to remove inactive subscribers periodically.

Senders see only their own proxies: open and click rates, replies and unsubscribes. Mailchimp notes that bot activity such as Apple Mail Privacy Protection can inflate open and click figures, so these numbers need care.

Engagement is why warm-up starts with the most engaged recipients, as Google and AWS both advise, and why senders run sunset policies.