Lightburn

First there were content filters. Followed by the “spam” button. Now major ISPs are looking at a new way to determine whether your message hits inbox.

Engagement.

We’ve always been a big believer in engagement.  What marketer isn’t.  After all, if your subscribers aren’t interacting with the email why send it?  Now engagement is more important than ever.  According to Deirdre Baird, president of e-mail deliverability and optimization consultancy Pivotal Veracity.

Inbox providers are increasingly monitoring for when recipients don’t interact with a mailer’s messages. At AOL and Yahoo, for example, if someone signs up for an e-mail list and then never opens the messages, at some point the mailer’s messages will start being shunted off to the recipient’s spam folder, even though the messages are permission based.

For now this won’t affect business-to-business mailers sending to private domains as will consumer mailers targeting personal email addresses.  Either way, the days of sending the same message to your entire list appear to be all but over.