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One often overlooked aspect of email marketing programs is the level to which your audience is engaged and interacts with your mailing.  Too many people focus on the size of their list as a measure of their success.  "If we send to more people, we'll sell more," seems to be the thinking.

I've had plenty of conversations with clients that focus on exactly that. What I always try to explain is that there isn't necessarily a correlation between number of recipients and number of sales. If you're sending to someone who has decided that they are no longer interested in your product, you're wasting money. Ideally, the goal is to re-engage those recipients, but short of that, you're better off if they're not included in your campaigns.

Eventually, they will be, but probably not in the manner that you prefer. If someone truly isn't interested, they can take a few approaches:

• Ignore your emails but continue to receive them.
• Set up a filter to make sure your emails don't show up in their inbox.
• Unsubscribe
• Report them as SPAM (Happens more and more with emails that people know they signed up for at one time)

And keep in mind that emails go bad. Eventually, people change jobs or ISPs or any number of reasons abandon an email account (including my favorite:  "I was getting too much SPAM at the old address, so I set up a new one.")  If you're not paying attention to their engagement, you don't know they're gone until the address bounces.

Mark Brownlow posted an excellent article on the dangers of not addressing engagement. Not the least of which is that engagement is used by ISPs to determine whether your mailings belong in the inbox or not.

Kris Dougherty | Deliverability