more specificity to "insights"

[rcppubs23]

On the contacts insights page, you report the number and percentage of most engaged, somewhat engaged, and least engaged subscribers. It would really be more helpful if you provided some sense of what those are based on. For instance, does "most engaged" mean the number of subscribers who open 75% of the emails sent? Or 80%? or 60%? etc. There must be some numbers or percentages your code is referencing to categorize "most" and "somewhat" and "least"--so why not let us in on the secret. Similar things come up in other places also, including the annual reports you send which as far as I can tell bear no relationship to anything actually going on in our account.

[William_A · Accepted solution]

Hello @rcppubs23 ,

I'm moving this to Questions & Discussions, since the algorithms for calculating engagement levels isn't really something we can outwardly share, and thus this wouldn't be able to qualify as an Idea.

Email engagement reporting is based on a myriad of factors, including how many contacts you have, how often you send your emails, as well as how often and to what degree those contacts engage with the materials - opens, clicks, repeated opens and clicks, etc. I'd recommend checking out our main article on understanding email engagement, for further insight into how best to utilize these metrics. The article also contains how best to approach these different engagement levels, especially the low engagement contacts.

[rcppubs23]

Thanks for the response, and the link. I had actually read all of this before I posed the question, but I went ahead and read it again to see if I'd missed anything.

I wasn't really asking you to supply your full algorithm, though it may have sounded that way. But the terms "most" - "somewhat" - "least" don't give a very good sense. We have a list with going back almost 2 decades--and we'd like to know if these figures take into account the full list or only more recent subscribers. Might someone fall into somewhat or more engaged if they did not open any emails for several years, and then started opening emails again and do so more consistently now? The points about contacting less engaged contacts for the purpose of reengagement campaigns is widely known, but it's very hard to think about creative ways to further engage the "more" or "somewhat" engaged if you don't have a real sense of what characterizes the engagement.

[William_A]

Engagement levels are unique to your account and recalculated each week based on the number of emails you’ve sent, which contacts you’ve targeted for each mailing, your email open rate, and your email click rate.

Based on this, even if a contact had previously not engaged with your material at all, if they've recently started engaging more, then it's highly unlikely that they'll be included in your account's "least engaged" category. 

Keep in mind, this is based on the contacts' activity as much as it is yours. Even if you aren't sending as many emails to your high engagement scored contacts, as long as they engage when you do send to them, their score will remain high. So you don't need to worry about a high engagement contact's score deprecating in regards to the weekly recalculations, if you haven't sent them anything recently.