Our user engagement levels are one of the best single predictors of who will respond to your emails. While it varies across different userbases, typically the users who are previously active have clicks, opens, and RPM (revenue per thousand emails sent) of at least 5-10 times and often 30 or more times that of dormant and disengaged users.

But there’s one group of people that don’t fit as easily into the engagement levels: new signups. Someone who’s just joined your list is a bit of an unknown. She might wind up being one of your best customers, or might be a dead email that will sit on your list with a coma-like level of responsiveness.

Our solution before was: initially new users join as Dormant, and then if they ever click or open, they become Passive, Active, or Engaged. But it’s better to distinguish dormant users who just signed up from dormant users who have been sitting on your list for ages. Why? The former typically have pretty high engagement rates, closer to passives, and when you separate them out, the latter may not even be worth sending to.

So, effective immediately, we’ve got a new engagement level. And we’re appropriately enough calling it New.

New users are defined as those who have signed up within the last X days, but have not yet opened or clicked.

In the hierarchy of engagement, you can usually think of New users as better than Disengaged users but worse than Passives. After all, at least Passives have demonstrated that they read your emails. That’s where our numbers show their engagement levels tend to land. But life as a New user is short: the moment a New user demonstrates some kind of engagement, they immediately become promoted to Passive or Active.

The end result: you are going to see your numbers for Dormants go down, since that group will no longer contain the New users. But you will have a new group to look at which offers more potential than the Dormants. Let us know what you think!