How email engagement shapes your deliverability
The term “email engagement” refers to how recipients interact with the messages you send them. Usually when we say “email engagement”, we are referring to positive engagement signals, like opening or clicking on an email. While inbox providers cannot see your email conversion rates (whether or not a recipient made a purchase after clicking your email), conversion rate is a helpful internal tool for your team to determine whether your messages are actually helping to drive revenue. Having high, consistent engagement on these positive metrics will help build a strong sender reputation.
There are also negative engagements, such as unsubscribing or marking an email as spam. While unsubscribing is always preferable to marking an email as spam, you want to try and limit both rates to be as low as possible. Having high rates of negative engagement metrics will hurt your sender reputation.
Inbox providers cannot see your conversion rate. Conversion is still worth tracking, because it tells your team whether your messages drive revenue, but it does not feed your sender reputation the way opens, clicks, unsubscribes, and spam complaints do.