For government agencies interested in performance metrics, Engagement Rate is a key metric, as it provides a true measure of messaging success for the public sector. Your Engagement Rate is the most relevant piece of data, as it shows how many of your subscribers are interacting with your content and responding to your communication efforts over time. Engagement Rate also takes into account the fact that information coming from government is timelier and does not necessarily require a link click to be considered a successful message.
Your Engagement Rate includes people who both open or click on your message, providing a more complete picture of subscribers engaging with your content. Why both? In our experience partnering with more than 1,800 government organizations worldwide, we've learned that if a subscriber opens your email and sees the information he or she needs, then you've successfully communicated with that subscriber -- even if there were no clicks recorded.
For example, if a Federal agency sends an email to subscribers letting them know that a national park closed for environmental upkeep and citizens avoid that park, then that agency has been successful in informing the public. No clicking necessary.
You can view engagement rate for your account and bulletins in reports such as the Topic/Category Report, and the Account Performance Report. The Engagement Rate calculation takes the number of unique email recipients who opened an email or clicked on a link in an email and flags them as “Engaged”. The number of “Engaged” users is divided by the number of unique email recipients who received an email during the same time period. Activity is tracked over 90 days. The time frame of tracked email recipients is shorter than the time frame of tracked activity to account for 2 weeks of open or click interactions that may occur after the last tracked email is sent.
For example, if a report is generated on May 1, it will include all email recipients from January 16 – April 15th (blue arrow). The message activity (red arrow) is then still captured through April 30 to account for any opens or clicks that occur after April 15th.
Note on Apple Updates and Engagement Rate:
As part of Apple’s recent software upgrades focusing on email preferences and privacy, Apple released a feature in September 2021 called Mail Privacy Protection which offers Apple Mail app users the option to load remote content privately and not disclose their IP addresses. This means that an email will be marked as open regardless of whether the email was opened or not, resulting in inflated total open rates due to a proportion of recipients being Apple users who have upgraded to this software and enabled this feature. This change impacts all email comms platforms, not just govDelivery, so we expect to see an industry re-baselining around open rates as a metric. Rest assured that click rates aren't going anywhere and your messages to your subscribers continue to have a positive impact on the communities you serve.
