Email engagement bands in Ometria

Overview

Ometria assigns email engagement bands to your contacts, so you can:

• accurately segment your contacts on the basis of specific interactions, optimising the customer’s experience, and;
• send emails to only engaged contacts, avoiding ‘batch and blast’ marketing (which can cause deliverability issues).

An engagement score is calculated based on deliveries, opens and clicks for your Ometria campaigns over the last 180 days. 

The engagement score is not calculated until the contact has been subscribed for four weeks - until then, their engagement band will be ‘New’.

Be aware that engagement bands are not 'one size fits all' - they depend on your account's deliverability data. This means that using engagement bands to send emails might not be the best way to ensure maximum deliverability to your contacts. 

Note: Transactional email interactions are not included as part of email engagement calculations.

Engagement bands

Note: Dynamic segments update every 24 hours (or every six hours, if they are used in an automation flow), and engagement bands are recalculated every 24 hours, so changes might not be immediately reflected. 

Viewing engagement bands

You can see your contacts’ engagement scores in the following screens:

• The customer cohorts table in the Segment explorer.
• The customer snapshot graphs in Customer insights.
• The customer’s profile.

You can also use the Customer filter to segment your contacts based on their engagement bands:

Broadcast campaigns - Exclude unengaged contacts

When setting up a broadcast campaign, you have an option to Exclude unengaged contacts: 

If you select this, you are excluding contacts in the No engagement band, as these contacts have a score of 0.

Contacts with an ‘unknown’ engagement band (-) are still included, as they do not have a score yet.

How engagement bands are calculated

The engagement bands are calculated by comparing a contact’s individual engagement score to your account average.

Individual engagement score

To qualify for an engagement band, a contact must have received at least one email in the past 180 days.

Engagement includes any interaction with an Ometria campaign (opens and clicks) within seven days of the contact’s receiving the email.

Note: Clicks have a higher weighting than opens because we consider a click to indicate a higher level of intent from the contact.

Ometria calculates a contact’s engagement score by weighing the number of opens and clicks and then multiplying it by an age decay factor (based on how many days ago the interaction occurred - more recent events have a greater weighting) for each interaction. This is called a raw score calculation. 

Each contact’s engagement score is the sum of all their interactions divided by the sum of the interaction weights and age decay factors. 

• If a contact has received seven or more emails in the past 180 days, their engagement score is based on the raw score calculation
• If a contact has received between one and six emails in the past 180 days, they will get an engagement score that is weighted against the account average.
• If a contact has received at least one email for all time, but none in the past 180 days, the account average is applied to them. This is called account average protection.

This is to ensure contacts who have not had the opportunity to engage are not defined as No engagement. I.e. If a contact has not been targeted in any recent campaigns this will not disproportionately impact their score.

Account average engagement

The account average is all of your contacts' individual engagement scores divided by the number of contacts (excluding those in the New subscriber and ‘-’ bands).

There will always be some contacts with a positive engagement score, but with no click/opens, if they have had less than six opportunities to engage. This is because they are given account average protection.

FAQ

How are the account average engagement score and the weighted account engagement scores calculated?

Average account engagement score formula:

avg(nullif(raw_score,0)) OVER (PARTITION BY account_id) 

Weighted account engagement score formula:

(_min_events - n_delivered) * (avg(nullif(raw_score, 0)) OVER (PARTITION BY account_id)) + n_delivered * raw_score) / _min_events with _min_events = 6