Deliverability
Engagement rate
How often recipients open, click, or otherwise interact with your email — a primary signal mailbox providers use to decide future inbox placement.
What counts as engagement
Positive signals include opening, clicking, replying, adding you to contacts and moving your mail out of spam. Negative signals include deleting without reading, ignoring your mail for months, and marking it as spam.
Mailbox providers see all of this, including signals you can’t measure yourself, such as how long an email stays open or whether it was deleted unread.
Why it drives deliverability
Providers use engagement to predict whether each recipient wants your next email. Consistently ignored mail drifts toward spam, first for the people ignoring it and eventually for everyone.
How to improve it
- Segment by engagement, and send less often to contacts who haven’t opened in 90 days.
- Run a re-engagement campaign, then suppress contacts who still don’t respond.
- Send what people signed up for, when they expect it.
- Make unsubscribing easy. An unsubscribe costs you far less than a spam complaint.
Let MailCraft handle the details
Authentication, bounces, complaints and suppression are built in. Start free with 3,000 emails a month, no credit card required.
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Full glossaryEmail types & metrics
Open rate
The share of delivered emails recorded as opened. Increasingly imprecise due to privacy features that pre-fetch images regardless of a real open.
Email types & metrics
Click-through rate (CTR)
The share of delivered emails that received at least one click on a tracked link — a stronger engagement signal than open rate.
Email types & metrics
Segment
A dynamically evaluated group of contacts matching a set of property or event filters, used to target campaigns and automations precisely.