When it comes to maintaining a healthy email list, the secret is quality over quantity. If you're sending emails to people who are not opening or clicking emails -- or worse, marking them as spam -- this can severely impact your sender reputation and overall deliverability in a negative way.

Springbot recommends only sending emails to engaged subscribers, and we've put a few features in place to help you accomplish this easily.

The default Springbot engagement threshold is 3 months. This is the amount of time that Springbot will take into account to determine if a subscriber is displaying engaged behavior or not. For example, if they opened, clicked, or "confirmed at" an email within 3 months, they would be considered an engaged subscriber. If they did not take any of those actions during the threshold time, they would be considered non-engaged.

You have the option to adjust your engagement threshold if you want to establish a more or less aggressive engagement strategy. Fair warning, a high engagement threshold (over 120 days) will likely damage your sender reputation and adversely impact open rates, bounce rates and other important email metrics.

If you want to change your engagement threshold, head to the drop down on the top right of the screen and go to Store Settings.
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Under Email Settings, you can change the engagement threshold if needed, but we recommend leaving this as the default (3 months).

By default, Springbot will create two segments for you focusing on your subscriber engagement. The Engaged and Unengaged segments can be found in Audience > Segments.

Here you will see your engagement segments:

Not only are these segments a good place to understand your overall engagement, but you can use these segments to help improve your overall sending reputation and engagement.
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How can you make the most of this data? We've outlined a few ways to take advantage of subscriber segments below!

When sending an email campaign, you have the option to apply Filters to your campaign to make your message more targeted. By sending your emails to your Engaged Subscribers, this can help improve your sender reputation, inbox placement and overall deliverability rates.

When building your email campaign, you can select your filter on the Configure step. By choosing your Engaged Subscribers segment as the filter, the email will only be sent to contacts within that segment.

Since these are your most engaged subscribers, it's a good idea to incentivize them with offers and promotions, as they are the most likely to open and click on your email which works to keep your sender reputation in good standing.

Sending an email targeted toward your Unengaged Subscribers can help to salvage some contacts before deciding to remove them from your email list. It is not recommended to send re-engagement or winback campaigns more than 3 times within 3 months, as this can harm your sender reputation. Rather, these emails are meant to be used as a "last chance effort" to get your at-risk contacts to engage one last time before removing/sunsetting them from your email list.

When building your email campaign, you can select your filter on the Configure step. By choosing your Unengaged Subscribers segment as the filter, the email will only be sent to contacts within that segment.

Even though these subscribers have not engaged within the last 3 months, it's still a good idea to incentivize them with offers and promotions, as this might be what pushes them to open and click your email and will put them into back an engaged standing, which is the goal! For those that remain unengaged, we recommend unsubscribing them from your email lists.

If you’re experiencing email problems such as low open rates or high block rates, skip this step and focus on sending only to engaged until your email metrics improve.

If you observe a quantity of clicks that seem inaccurate, the most common explanation is that a spam filter in the recipient server is the cause.

Aggressive spam filters may open messages and click links in incoming mail before delivering them to attempt to perform spam activity. Unfortunately, we have no way of differentiating when a click is from a spam filter.

This is unfortunately a common occurance, and we generally recommend relying on the system of “unique” opens and clicks to better inform what is likely to be human engagement.