We all know that mass mailings are a thing of the past. To be a successful email marketer, you must engage your audience in relevant and timely conversations. But what does that mean? There is a lot of hype surrounding email engagement, and everyone has a different opinion on what engagement really means. We have identified the six levels of engagement to help you cut through the hype so you can optimize your email strategies and interact with your subscribers in a meaningful, individualized way.

Stage 1: Delivered
In the batch-and-blast days, a valid email address was a sign of success. Now, instead of focusing on just reaching the inbox, you must be concerned with the right time to deliver your messages. It requires an intimate knowledge of you customer’s shopping habits — knowing what they like, how they shop, when they buy, what offers they respond to — and the ability to reach them at the right time with the right message.

Stage 2: Opened
The most basic of email metrics, the open rate was once a measure of a successful email subject line. As email marketing has evolved, the open metric has become an engagement indicator as well. When recipients open your email you know several things about them: They recognized and trusted your brand, you reached them at a convenient time, and they’re somewhat interested in hearing from you. However, the open metric can be misleading, as subscribers who opened your message just to unsubscribe count toward your open rate while subscribers who read your message in the preview pane with the images turned off are overlooked.

Stage 3: Credible
Building on the open metric, a more accurate measurement of subscriber engagement is the read rate of your messages. We measure the read rate as messages that have been held open for five seconds or longer, automatically disregarding unsubscribes and subscribers who simply glanced at but didn’t read your entire email. This helps determine the credibility of your messages. Credible messages are convincing, reliable, trustworthy, and sincere; they feel more like a dialogue than a monologue.

Stage 4: Relevant
Relevant emails are even more enhanced as they are optimized to deliver messages and offers that are applicable, significant, appropriate, and pertinent to each customer. To create relevant messages, you must use all of the data available to you — not just open and click rates, but past purchase history, RFM metrics, and clickstream reports. And you need to use advanced email strategies and solutions, such as dynamic messaging, triggered drip campaigns, and behavioral targeting, to automate the delivery of the extremely personalized messages. Mass mailings are relevant to no one.

Read more at I Media Connection