Mastering Email Engagement with Lead Gen & CRM

Effective email marketing hinges on more than just sending messages—it’s about ensuring your audience is genuinely engaged. Thanks to the robust capabilities of the Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM platform, marketers now have advanced tools to track and boost engagement like never before.

In this article, we’ll walk you through the comprehensive email engagement features available in Constant Contact, and how they help safeguard your sender reputation while improving inbox placement and overall performance.

Why Engagement Matters

ISPs (Internet Service Providers) now prioritise engagement when deciding whether to deliver your emails to the inbox or the dreaded spam folder. Gone are the days of mass-emailing a generic list and hoping for the best. Today, successful email strategies focus on sending relevant, timely content to contacts who actively engage—those who open emails, click links, and visit your website.

Constant Contact assigns every contact an engagement score to help you segment and prioritise your sends. It also enables interactions through form submissions, IMAP-synced mailboxes, Media Centre links, and tracked site visits, while automatically suppressing sends to unengaged recipients.

Reconfirm and Reconnect

Reconfirming contacts—asking if they still want to hear from you—is a simple, but powerful way to clean your list and maintain compliance with regulations like GDPR. Not only does this protect your deliverability, but it also improves your open and click rates by ensuring you’re only messaging people who truly want to engage.

Understanding the Engagement Score

Every contact is assigned an initial engagement score based on how they entered your system:

• 16 points – via form submission
  
• 9 points – manually added, CRM sync, list import, or API
  
• 0–9 points – based on the quality of imported/API-created contacts

This score dynamically changes based on their activity. Each email sent without engagement reduces the score by one point. Once it reaches 0, the contact is classified as unengaged and will be excluded from future bulk and automated sends (unless re-engaged).

Re-Engagement in Action

Here’s a real-world example:

1. A contact completes a form—score starts at 16.
   
2. They ignore 6 emails—score drops to 10.
   
3. They reply to an IMAP-synced email—score jumps back to 16.
   
4. They ignore 10 more emails—score drops to 6.
   
5. They fill out another form—score returns to 16.
   
6. After 16 ignored emails, score hits 0.
   
7. They visit a tracked webpage—score rises to 6.

This illustrates how multiple interactions—from clicks to form fills—can reset or boost engagement, helping maintain an active relationship.

Engagement Categories

Based on their score and activity, contacts are categorised as:

• Highly Engaged: Score of 15–16 with recent activity (within 19 months)
  
• Engaged: Score of 5–16
  
• Low Engagement: Score of 1–4 or inactive for 20+ months
  
• Unengaged: Score of 0 or inactive for 24+ months

Use these segments to tailor your messaging and improve your targeting.

Automate with Engagement Filters

Constant Contact makes it easy to include or exclude contacts based on engagement levels in your workflows, lists, and sends. For instance, you can set automation to:

• Exclude unengaged contacts from campaigns
  
• Suppress low engagement contacts from certain sends
  
• Target only highly engaged leads for promotions

This not only improves performance but protects your sender reputation.

System-Generated Lists & Exclusion Automation

The platform also provides ready-made, dynamic lists:

• Highly Engaged Contacts
  
• Contacts with Low Engagement
  
• Unengaged Contacts

These lists are automatically updated and can be used to streamline exclusions, campaign targeting, or reconfirmation processes.

You can also create your own exclusion rules or automation triggers to refine targeting even further.

Evaluating New or Imported Contacts

Contacts imported via a list or API are evaluated using third-party tools. Poor quality addresses are flagged, and if more than 55% of a list is considered invalid, the import will be rejected. This ensures only credible contacts are included in your database, reducing bounce rates and boosting deliverability.

Email Bot Filtering

To maintain accuracy in your reporting, Constant Contact includes an Email Engagement Bot Filter. This filter helps remove false positives caused by spam filters or security software (like Apple Mail’s auto-opens), giving you more realistic engagement data. It’s turned on by default, but can be toggled off in your settings.

The Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM platform offers a powerful suite of engagement tools to help you build smarter campaigns, maintain a healthy domain reputation, and focus your efforts where they’ll have the biggest impact.

By staying informed on how your contacts interact with your content, you can send more targeted, effective emails—and achieve better results.

Ready to make the most of your email marketing? Dive into your engagement tools today and start optimising every send.

If you'd like to learn more about Constant Contact and how it could benefit your marketing and CRM journeyplease get in touch with us here.