What is engagement scoring?
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Engagement scoring is a way of turning subscriber behavior into a number, so you can treat different levels of engagement differently instead of treating your whole list the same way.
The basic idea: you assign point values to actions subscribers take. A click might be worth 5 points. A purchase worth 20. An open worth 1 (carefully, given Apple's Mail Privacy Protection inflating open tracking). Inactivity subtracts points over time. Each subscriber ends up with a score that tells you roughly where they sit on the active-to-disengaged spectrum.
What you actually do with scores
Scoring is only useful if it changes how you communicate. In practice, most senders split their list into tiers:
High scorers (your most engaged) get your full sending cadence. These are the readers worth investing in. Test new content here. They'll tell you what works.
Mid-range subscribers might get slightly reduced frequency or a different content mix. They're still showing some interest, just not at the top level.
Low scorers get a re-engagement sequence. One or two emails saying "hey, still interested?" and a clear opt-out option. If they don't respond, suppress them.
The key thing engagement scoring does is prevent you from sending your full volume to addresses that have stopped caring. That matters for deliverability: inbox providers measure how often your emails get ignored, moved to spam, or deleted unread. A cleaner engaged list outperforms a larger disengaged one, every time.
Building a simple score
But you don't need a sophisticated system to start. A simple version: anyone who's clicked in the last 90 days is "active." Anyone who opened but didn't click in 90 days is "warm." Anyone with zero activity in 90 days is "cold." Send to all three with different expectations and different content.
From there you can get more granular. Review My Emails Insights (coming soon) will track per-subscriber engagement history so you can build scoring without losing your data if you switch ESPs. Until then, defining inactivity thresholds in your current ESP is the place to start.
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