About this metric

The most used data to measure and understand the level of engagement is the reactivity rate. The higher the rate, the better the engagement.

A high reactivity rate will improve your deliverability. It's a sign that you're paying attention to all components. That's reputation, mailing list quality, and likely content. (since your CTR will tend to be higher than average).

A metric at the crossroads of opens and clicks

Open and click-through rates are used everywhere in email marketing. The reactivity rate is a simple division of these two metrics. If you don't know about click-through rates, take time to consult our articles on them.

Open rate

This is the ratio of recipients who open the email over the number of inboxes reached. The open rate is key data for calculating  performance in the field of email marketing. This gives an idea of the relevance of your campaigns for the target audience.

Click-through rate

The click-through rate is the proportion of people who clicked on the links offered. It gauges interest in the message and requires you work on the appearance, content and call to action.

Reactivity rate formula

Reactivity rate = (percentage of emails clicked / percentage of emails opened) * 100

Let's take an example:

I send a campaign promoting a new product

• 32% of the recipients open this email
• 12% of the recipients click on the link to my website to learn more
• In this case, my reactivity rate is (12/32)*100 = 37.5%.

Why is this important? This indicator relates the performance of the click rate to the open rate. This gives you an easy to judge metric.

In this example, 12% of the people who received the message performed the requested action. That's opening the link. This might not seem like much, but with a reactivity rate of 37.5%, we can estimate that the performance is good.

Other less positive engagement signals

A reactivity rate that remains low campaign after campaign mean lower engagement. This leads to lower deliverability. Some engagements can compromise your deliverability. In particular:

If too many recipients mark you as spam, you risk compromising your deliverability. This can tarnish your reputation even up to the point of blacklisting.

An unsubscribe will not impact your deliverability, in theory. Only if it's followed by a significant amount of other unsubscribes. As you might expect, this is not a positive engagement signal.

The address you provide for your subscribers to reply to you has an impact on their desire to respond. A reply is a positive signal. You're indicating interest in opening a dialogue with your mailing list members.

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