Engagement Tools

What are FunnelBud's engagement tools, and why use them?

FunnelBud's Engagement tools were created to help more emails reach your recipient's inboxes. A bit counterintuitively, this is achieved by sending less emails, avoiding sending to contacts that don't open or click your emails on a regular basis in order to get more delivered emails to the inboxes of those that do.

When a contact is considered to have "Low Engagement", emails will be suppressed by default. This happens when a contact has not opened 5 emails in a row for imported contacts, 12 emails in a row for people who sign up on the website, and also has not performed any tracked activity on the web (among other actions, more listed below).

This is a good thing, we have actually seen that more people open emails when you don't send to contacts who never open. This is because more people who do open emails them get them in their inbox rather than in the "other" or "spam" box. Microsoft and Google have algorithms that calculate how many people on average open a company's emails, and if you send to a lot of contacts who don't open, then they will stop delivering your emails to others as well. FunnelBud has proven the effectivity of this strategy and written about it in this blog article.

FunnelBud has two lists to help us monitor unengagement:

• Contacts with Low Engagement - Contacts with an engagement score of 4 or less - you should try to re-engage with these contacts from time to time (3-6 months) with an email that has a strong subject line and CTA to encourage clicks.

• Unengaged Contacts - Contacts with an engagement score of 0 - you will no longer be able to send emails to these contacts, and will have to re-engage with them in other ways. Our recommendation is to enable Email Sync, then email the contact from your personal mailbox. If they reply, their response will be synced and their engagement score will be reset.

When do you want to untick the box "Suppress recipients with low engagement"? 

You should only untick that box for emails that are very likely to be opened and/or clicked by someone who hasn't been reading your content for a while. This mail should have a powerful subject line and a strong call to action. You should not do this too often, you have 4 chances to re-engage with a "low engagement" contact, and should not waste the opportunity to get them to re-engage - we recommend doing this every 3 to 6 months.

How the Engagement Score works, in detail:

Every contact has an engagement score, which indicates whether they are interacting with your content or not. The engagement score starts at either 16 (leads that come in through forms) or 9 (leads that are imported). Every time an email is sent to them, their engagement score drops by 1, until it reaches 4 and they are considered at risk of unengagement, and emails start being suppressed.

This means that:

- Someone who was added through a form will receive 12 emails before they have low engagement (score of 4)

- Someone who was imported will receive 5 emails before they have low engagement (score of 4)

How does a contact show that they are engaging with your emails:

- When they open an email

- When they click a link in an email

- When they fill out a form

- When they visit a tracked website page (and have also opened at least 1 email)

- When they click on a Media Center link

- When they send an email to one of your employees that has Email Sync set up in FunnelBud

When a contact does one of the things above, the engagement score resets to 16, which allows them to be sent another 12 emails before they have low engagement again.

Written by: Sam Koekemoer