Analyzing Recipient Behavior for Email Success
Holy sheets and blankets, it’s almost 2025!
Whether you’re lookin’ back or lookin’ ahead, it’s safe to say you want your email program to shine like the brightest star in the sky (or is that Jupiter? I can never tell. But I digress. Point is...)
You wouldn’t be reading this right now if you didn’t want your email program to make an impact. 💌
So, in today’s lesson, let’s talk about how to roll with the ever-changing needs of our email recipients.
We have no choice but to accept that life (and email) is constantly evolving.
Attentions shift. Loyalties fade. Budgets tighten. Priorities change. People change.
And when the things you know — or think you know — about your email recipients change, it can affect the way they interact with you via email.
Best case, you have a few readers who are kind enough to unsubscribe when they want off the ride. That’s ok! Unsubscribes aren’t bad for deliverability, remember?
Worst case, they skip that easy unsubscribe option and go straight for the jugular (ahem, mark your email as spam). That’s…not ok. That’s very bad, in fact.
Sitting in between those two scenarios: perhaps your unsub and spam complaint rates are nice and low, but you’re seeing a decline in open and click rates over time.
Identifying change is half the battle.
When it comes to dwindling engagement, the most common reasons are:
You’ve become white noise. Why recipients lost interest is up to you to figure out, but it typically comes from sending too often or not delivering enough value — or both!
Your mail’s going to the spam folder…at least, a portion of it is. This can stem from a variety of issues…spam complaints, low levels of positive engagement (like opens and clicks) stemming from poor list collection or segmentation, missing (or misconfigured) authentication, etc.
Changes in your recipients’ lives or interests. This one has nothin’ to do with you, but it certainly impacts your email performance.
The good news? We’ve got data on our side, allowing us to figure out what’s going on.
I’ve talked about how to monitor your email performance in the past, so let’s not go there again. If you missed it, get caught up by reading this lesson on how to catch (and lower) deliverability red flags.
💌 One quick tip for good measure though… reviewing your open rates at the destination level in addition to your aggregate open rates is a good way to tell which issue you’re facing. Figure, if you’re targeting all your recipients within a particular campaign the same way, the open rates should all be within relatively the same range.
For example, if your average open rate at Google is 33%, your open rates will typically be within 5-10 percentage points of each other across the mailbox providers you send to. In this example, Yahoo look pretty close to Google, but we’re chillin’ around 4% with Microsoft. It’s pretty clear that mail is going to the spam folder with that particular destination.
If you need a lil’ help assessing whether you have a deliverability issue or not, check out these blog posts I wrote on what to do when you suspect a deliverability issue. Or you can just reach out…I love nerding out over email stats and deliv issues! 💌
How to deal.
You’ve been getting my newsletter for a while now…I’m sure you’ve noticed how often I talk about recipient engagement. A lot. Like, A LOT a lot.
And for good reason! Recipient engagement is one of the main drivers for deliverability, particularly with major mailbox providers like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.
But even within the more simplistic anti-spam filtering used by less well-known providers, negative recipient engagements (ahem: spam complaints) have carried heavy weighting since forever.
So, you really can’t get away from pleasing your readers.
A couple of suggestions for how to adjust to changes in recipient engagement based on where the change is happening.
For new sign-ups and customers:
Learn from the behavior of new signups, particularly if you’re seeing spam complaints or unsubscribe rates that are elevated. It’s…really not a good sign when someone jumps off the ride so quickly.
It’s like buying a movie ticket and then bailing during the opening credits. There’s gotta be a reason driving that behavior. Go find it, you email sleuth, you!
1️⃣ Dig into your lead magnets.
Which ones are driving sign ups or purchases vs ones that generate higher hard bounces and negative engagement? Consider if the emails you’re planning to send match the reason why they’ve entered your life in the first place. Align those magnets with your actual email goals, set expectations about what’s to come, and then send emails that fulfill that need.
2️⃣ Review stats for your welcome email or series.
What’s driving engagement (generating high opens, clicks and conversions) and what might be causing people to ignore you or bail via spam complaint or unsubscribe?
3️⃣ Compare lead sources and sign-up forms if you have more than one.
Are there any differences in quality that you can trace back to problematic list collection practices? Or perhaps there’s an issue with not properly setting expectations at the point of sign-up?
For the existing recipients on your list:
Using historical data about recipients’ engagement throughout the year can help you understand what’s important.
This is all about lookin' for trends, my friends. Patterns to help separate our lists into more meaningful segments and send more meaningful emails based on what people seem to care about.
Things to consider:
💌 How frequently do people engage? (i.e. open, click, or reply.) Answering this not only helps with figuring out the ideal sending frequency for each segment. You can also determine if you’re delivering consistent value, or if are there certain types of content or offers that people enjoy less. Heck, it’s possible you could actually be sending more mail…just, not to the people who haven’t opened a single email from you this year.
💌 How often do they convert? If your email goals extend beyond opens and clicks and you have access to the data, compare the overall value of those interactions now vs 6-12+ months ago. Are they only active during the gift-centric holidays, suggesting they’re shopping for others? Do they only purchase items when they’re on sale, or are they willing to pay full price?
💌 Have they continued to engage? A steady decline suggests your emails and/or offers have lost their sparkle or your high volume is causing fatigue with your readers, whereas if you see a sharp drop off in engagement, you should consider what were you sendin’ around that time that either shooed them away or landed in you in email jail (aka the spam folder). Was it an overly aggressive offer that promised more than it delivered, spammy sales tactics tricking people into opening, or perhaps you sent to every email address you’ve ever collected. Tell me straight, Froggy McFroggerson.
💌 If you send multiple types of offers or content, which ones do people engage with the most? See if you can find commonalities between your best (or worst) performing campaigns and make a hypothesis about what you think might be driving that behavior. Then brainstorm some ways to send more of what they seem to like and less of what seems to be leading them to push the snooze button.
💌 What else might be goin’ on? As much as I love email (and boy, do I love email), there is not one single person in this world who makes decisions based solely on the contents of their inbox. So, consider factors coming from outside the email channel, such as market conditions impacting people’s finances, current events taking more of people’s attention than usual, or problems with a product or poor customer service that no amount of great email marketing can fix. I’m not trying to let you off the hook here, but sometimes those dips have literally nothing to do with you.
Don’t wear yourself out here, but going the extra mile — even if just once or twice a year — helps you have a much better understanding of the motivations of your email audience so you can group your recipients into meaningful buckets based on what they’ve shown you is important to them NOW.
A quick word of caution about shifting with your recipients’ tides…
It's obviously important to adapt to changing recipient behaviors, but a sudden shift in your strategy can confuse your audience and negatively impact your sender reputation.
So, take gradual steps towards optimization instead of making drastic changes, even if you find something that feels like it deserves to be torn down and built back from the ground up.
Experiment with different styles of subject lines, sender names (e.g. ‘Send It Right’ vs ‘Lauren from Send It Right’), content, and sending times to identify what resonates best with your audience.
Divide your audience into smaller, more targeted segments and tailor your emails to their past behavior to make each email feel more relevant and valuable to your readers.
Keep in mind, these elements all play together to form your readers’ opinions on whether to open, so be thoughtful about how you test. Make sure all the dots connect vs testing only 1 variable to avoid your emails feeling disjointed.
That’s it! (…for now.)
Until next time, happy sending!
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