More than just a performance indicator, the engagement rate tells how your subscribers interact with your content, how loyal they are to you, what they find interesting… or not. Real engagement is not measured superficially. It is analyzed over time, through the consistency of actions, and the sustained attention your messages manage to capture. In this article, we explain how to go beyond traditional indicators to take the real pulse of your campaigns.
Why calculating the engagement rate is essential
Tracking the engagement rate of your email campaigns is essential to know if your content is reaching its target, generating interest, or going unnoticed. This rate then becomes a valuable indicator of the performance of your actions, as well as the overall health of your contact list.
A good engagement rate reflects a receptive and active audience. This means your subscribers open your messages, show interest, and interact with your links or calls to action. Conversely, a drop in engagement can reveal a problem with content relevance, excessive frequency, or a poorly maintained database.
By measuring it regularly, you can spot trends, anticipate unsubscribes, and adjust your campaigns accordingly. It’s also a concrete way to demonstrate the value of your marketing efforts to your teams or clients.
According to Mailchimp, the average email open rate in 2025 is 21.3%, while the average email click rate is 2.6%. These figures vary across industries but provide an initial useful benchmark for assessing your performance.
Redefining engagement
Indicators like click or open rates are only the visible part of a larger behavior from your subscribers. They may open a message out of mere curiosity, while a click on a link shows an initial interest. Responding to the email or forwarding it to a third party, however, is a stronger sign of involvement, often revealing genuine attachment to your content.
Conversely, the absence of any interaction over several successive emails can indicate a gradual disengagement. It becomes essential to understand the reasons behind this to modify your strategy.
This finer reading of engagement allows for a better understanding of your audience’s habits and evolution over time. By observing their responsiveness, you can distinguish different profiles: new subscribers still in the discovery phase, those who rarely interact, occasionally active contacts, and those who are clearly engaged. Classifying your subscribers this way helps tailor your marketing actions to each person’s behavior.
Contextualizing with tenure
A new subscriber is not compared in the same way as a loyal subscriber:
Less than 1 month
When a contact has been subscribed for less than a month, any sign of interaction, even a simple open, is already a positive indicator. Generally, this is considered a “new” profile, in the discovery phase.
More than 1 month
Beyond the first month, it becomes relevant to distinguish different levels of engagement based on the frequency of interactions. A subscriber who rarely engages can be classified as “inactive” or “low engagement,” while another who regularly clicks or reacts to your campaigns can be classified as “occasional” or “engaged.”
Segmenting to go further
Active segmentation pushes the analysis even further:
- Classify subscribers by tenure: new, more than 3 months, from 3 to 12 months, more than 1 year
- Classify subscribers by reactivity: low, medium, high clicks
- Classify subscribers by journey stage: lead, customer, ambassador
This allows for comparing engagement scores of groups: a segment “occasional + long-time” becomes an excellent indicator of loyalty to work on.
Tracking over time to adjust
A single score is not enough to reflect the full reality of engagement. Multiple elements must be tracked over time to refine your analysis:
- Monitor the evolution of a campaign’s engagement rate to identify positive trends, sudden drops, or the effects of a strategy change.
- Analyze the overall volume of interactions, but also their nature. For instance, a large number of opens without clicks may indicate a lack of interest in the content provided.
- Observe behavior changes within your contact base. A previously inactive subscriber becoming more reactive, or vice versa, gives you valuable insights for adapting your actions.
Concrete example of engagement rate analysis
You run an email campaign to 5,000 contacts. After sending, you observe the following results: 1,000 opens, 150 clicks on your links, 20 direct responses to your message, and 5 shares of the email.
If you assign higher weight to the most engaging actions (for example, twice the value to a response than a simple click, and three times to a share), you can obtain a finer measure of overall engagement. By applying this weighting, the calculation becomes:
1,000 opens + 150 clicks + (20 responses × 2) + (5 shares × 3) = 1,205 weighted interactions.
You then divide this total by the number of emails sent (5,000), and multiply by 100 to get a percentage. The engagement score thus obtained is 25%. This is a good result, reflecting genuine interaction with your content.
But this analysis becomes even more relevant if you segment your base. Imagine that upon closer inspection, you notice that contacts subscribed for more than six months have an engagement rate of 30%, whereas new subscribers (less than a month) do not exceed 10%. This helps identify where to focus your efforts: perhaps it’s necessary to improve the welcome for new subscribers or instead capitalize more on the most loyal contacts.
Best practices to achieve a more reliable engagement rate
- Implement a double opt-in system to ensure your contacts are genuinely interested in your content and thus gain a more engaged and responsive base.
- Track links via UTM parameters to accurately distinguish clicks coming from your emails from those generated by other sources (social networks or search engines), thereby obtaining a more accurate view of your campaign’s real impact.
- Conduct A/B tests (email subjects, CTA, sending times, etc.) to identify what works best with your audience.
- Regularly clean your database to maintain email deliverability and improve the accuracy of your statistics.
- Create targeted reactivation campaigns by directly addressing rare or inactive subscribers to rekindle their interest.
Calculating the engagement rate means understanding what subscriber behaviors reveal, intelligently segmenting your base, and continuously adapting your actions. By applying these simple yet effective techniques, you turn your data into concrete decision-making tools, and your campaigns into truly effective actions.
