For professional communicators, such as marketing and PR practitioners, engagement data is invaluable for understanding the relevance of their targeting and messaging. High engagement indicates thoughtful targeting and personalized, relevant messaging. Low engagement suggests that more diligence is required. Learn more about The Importance of Targeting and the Role of Media Lists.
This article will cover:
Likely Causes of Low Email Engagement
There are a few common reasons your email engagement rates are low:
You’re emailing recipients too frequently
Your content is not valuable to your recipients
Your recipients are not expecting to receive mail from you
Your emails are flagged by the recipient’s email server and are either not delivered or end up in their spam folder.
The good news is that these are all factors that are in your control to impact.
Different engagement metrics can give you insights into specific aspects of your outreach efforts that can be optimized to improve performance. Learn more about Using Email Engagement Metrics to Improve and Drive Performance.
Additional Resources on Improving Engagement Rates:
How Email Tracking Works
These are three of the most common ways to enable email tracking:
Tracking pixels - these are small, trackable images embedded into the email
Read receipts - enabled through email clients such as Gmail and Outlook
Trackable Links - appended links inserted into the content of the email body
Meltwater offers email tracking through our third-party email provider, which enables tracking through using pixels. Here is how it works.
Tracking Pixels
A tracking pixel is a small, invisible image (hence pixel) that gets loaded from a tracking server with a coded filename. When a recipient opens an email, the pixel “fires,” and the email is flagged as opened. Tracking pixels is the most common approach to email tracking.
Discrepancy In Tracking Data
There are two key reasons why you might see some data discrepancies:
Underreporting - tracking pixels don’t work for all recipients
Data latency - there is some latency in data syncs between our third-party email provider and Meltwater
Underreporting
In practice, email clients (e.g. Gmail and Outlook) don’t always download images by default upon opening. If the recipient decides not to download images, the email can still be read, but the “open” will not be logged.
There are ways to limit open rates from being underreported. This requires following email best practices and avoiding spam tactics, such as:
Limit email distributions to small, highly targeted audiences
Well-researched and personalized pitches that add value to your recipient(s)
Consider whether the timing of your pitch is right for your recipient(s)
Implement DKIM/SPF when using third-party services to authenticate your domain to ensure optimal deliverability. Learn more about Email Delivery and Application - Specific Information.
Data Latency
Data syncs happen every 5-10 minutes between Meltwater and our third-party email provider. The data is synced sequentially by metric type (see the list of metrics below). This means that minor latency should be expected before the data refreshes in our product:
Sent
Opens
Clicked (for links within an email)
Bounced
Blocked
Industry Anti-Spam Standards and Domain Verification in Meltwater
Email deliverability is not complicated, but we, as a service provider, must abide by industry standards and make every effort to reduce spam.
In 2024, Google and Yahoo! started enforcing new guidelines and requirements for bulk senders, which are those senders who have domains that send or have ever sent email to more than 5,000 recipients in a day.
If you'd like to learn more about this, check out this Google Blog post.
Here are the main ways you can ensure your emails are being delivered:
Being relevant - People don’t want spam. Journalists and media contacts have a reasonable expectation that when someone reaches out to them with a pitch, press release, product, or service - it is relevant to them. If you have sent irrelevant information to a number of people, it is likely you will have more recipients unsubscribe from your email outreach.
Email authentication - Deliverability is improved when clients’ email servers are configured in a way where active SPF, DKIM, and DMARC policies are in place. These serve as email authentication methods that ensure that the participating computer servers in the email chain can validate who the sender really is. This protects recipients from spam, phishing, and other unwanted email. Within Meltwater, we provide the means to verify an approved sender’s domain using SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to help ensure that deliverability is not impacted.
Note: DMARC is a newer requirement for bulk senders - those who send to more than 5,000 recipients per day.
Don’t impersonate Gmail - Google has made it a restricted action to send email as a Gmail account. This means that our customers should not be using Gmail email addresses as approved senders. To date, this represents <1% of approved sender email addresses.
💡 Tip
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