Understanding the Engagement System

Learn how Tarvent’s engagement system helps you understand which contacts are interested, at risk, or ready to reengage.

What we'll cover

Overview
How engagement scoring works
Onboarding period (first 60 days)
Contact-level engagement metrics
Audience-level stats & send cadence
Smart filters
Using engagement in your marketing

1 Overview

Tarvent’s engagement system looks at how your contacts interact with your emails over time and turns that behavior into clear signals you can use for targeting and strategy.

Instead of manually checking opens, clicks, and bounces across multiple campaigns, Tarvent combines this data into scores, lifecycle stages, and smart filters so you can quickly answer questions like:

Who is highly engaged right now?
Who is starting to drift away or at risk of churn?
Who is worth investing in reengagement campaigns?
Is my sending pattern helping or hurting engagement?

The engagement system updates throughout the day for active contacts and rolls up larger audience trends overnight.

For a deeper dive into how scores and thresholds are calculated, see Understanding contact engagement scoring .

Pro tip: You don’t need to change how you send emails to get value from engagement data. Start by using it to choose who not to email as often (fatigued or high-risk contacts), then build up to more advanced segments over time.

2 How engagement scoring works

Engagement scoring turns contact behavior into numbers and labels you can understand at a glance. Every contact has:

An EngagementScore (0–100) – overall engagement rating.
An EngagementLevel – Hot, Warm, Cold, or Inactive.
An EngagementLifecycleStage – where they are in their journey (New, Active, At Risk, Dormant, Lost, or Reactivated).
A SendRecommendation – how aggressively you should be emailing them.

Events Tarvent tracks

When a contact interacts with your emails or account, Tarvent records events such as:

Opens and clicks
Replies
Form submissions
Bounces and unsubscribes
… and more

These events are processed regularly, and contacts who have new activity are flagged for engagement recalculation.

How often data updates

Contact-level engagement – recalculated several times per hour for contacts with new activity.
Recent activity summaries (Last 5 campaigns) – refreshed alongside engagement scores.
Audience-level and group-level stats – calculated daily and rolled up into weekly and monthly views.

The engagement system is cadence-aware. Scores and lifecycle thresholds adapt to your actual sending frequency instead of using a one-size-fits-all algorithm. A monthly sender and a daily sender are not judged by the same standards.

3 Onboarding period (first 60 days)

Engagement scoring needs some history before it can be fully accurate.

For the first 60 days after engagement scoring is enabled on your account, all existing contacts are treated as being in an onboarding period.
During this time, contacts are generally treated as New, and certain long-term metrics and trends will not be fully populated yet.
After the 60-day mark, you will see more complete scores, lifecycle stages, and patterns across your audiences.

The same idea applies to new contacts you add later:

When a new contact is created or imported, their engagement data starts in a New / onboarding state.
They need time to receive campaigns and either engage or stay quiet.
Their engagement view becomes more complete after they have been in your audience for about 60 days and have had the chance to receive multiple campaigns.

You will still see useful indicators well before 60 days (for example, recent opens or "Hot" vs "Cold"), but long-term trends, decay, and recovery patterns become more reliable after that onboarding period.

Pro tip: When you first enable engagement scoring or import a large list, expect the first 60 days to be a learning period for both you and the system. Focus on sending consistent, relevant campaigns so Tarvent has quality data to work with.

4 Contact-level engagement metrics

Each contact has a set of engagement fields that describe their current interest and history with your brand.

Core fields

EngagementScore (0–100) – overall engagement rating, combining recency, frequency, and quality of interactions.
EngagementLevel – a simplified label such as Inactive, Cold, Warm, or Hot.
EngagementLifecycleStage – stages like New, Active, At Risk, Dormant, Lost, or Reactivated based on time since last engagement and your send cadence.
DaysSinceLastEngagement – how long it has been since the contact last did something positive (open, click, reply, and so on).
PeakEngagementScore – the highest score the contact has reached so far.

Engagement levels vs lifecycle stages

Engagement data has two different "views" of a contact:

EngagementLevel tells you how interested they are right now (Hot, Warm, Cold, Inactive).
EngagementLifecycleStage tells you where they are in their journey (New, Active, At Risk, Dormant, Lost, Reactivated).

Some common lifecycle stages you’ll see:

New: Recently added to your audience and still in the onboarding period.
Active: Engaging regularly with your emails.
At Risk: Used to engage, but haven’t engaged in a while based on your normal sending cadence.
Dormant: Have not engaged for a longer period and may be close to Lost.
Lost: Have not engaged for a long time. These should not be in regular sends.
Reactivated: Were previously Dormant or Lost but started engaging again.

Because the system is cadence-aware, the time windows for these stages adjust to your sending pattern. A monthly sender gets longer windows than a daily sender.

Reengagement & risk

ReengagementProbability – how likely they are to respond to a reactivation effort.
ReengagementPriority – how worth the effort they are to win back (based on historical value).
ChurnRisk – chance they will effectively "disappear" and stop engaging.
UnsubscribeRisk – chance they will unsubscribe if you keep emailing them the same way.
ListFatigueScore – whether they may be receiving more than they are comfortable engaging with.

Recent activity snapshots (Last 5 campaigns for that contact)

Last5Count – how many campaigns, up to 5, have been sent to this contact.
Last5Opened / Last5Clicked – how many of the last 5 campaigns sent to this contact they opened or clicked.
Last5Bounced – how many of the last 5 campaigns sent to this contact bounced.

These "Last 5" fields always refer to the last 5 campaigns sent to that specific contact, not the last 5 campaigns your account has sent overall. They make it easy to see recent behavior without digging through individual campaign reports.

Engagement score vs CRM lead score

If you use a CRM, you may already have a lead score. It helps answer: "How likely is this person to become (or remain) a customer?"

Tarvent’s engagement score is different. It answers: "How much are they interacting with our emails right now?"

EngagementScore: Email behavior only (opens, clicks, recency, frequency, etc.).
Lead score (CRM): Broader sales readiness (fit, firmographics, deal stage, revenue, etc.).

For CRM users, the two work well together: the CRM lead score helps sales decide who to pursue, while Tarvent’s engagement score helps marketing decide who to email and how often.

5 Audience-level stats & send cadence

Beyond individual contacts, Tarvent calculates engagement metrics for entire audiences and groups that have been included in campaigns at least twice within the past 30 days.

Send cadence (behind the scenes)

Tarvent reviews your sending history for each audience and internally determines how often you normally send. This cadence is used to adjust engagement thresholds so that:

Monthly senders are not judged like daily senders.
Seasonal or sporadic senders get appropriately scaled expectations.
Lifecycle stage timing and score decay match your real sending pattern.

The raw "tier" or cadence value is not shown in audience reports, but the system uses it to keep your engagement stats fair and aligned with your sending behavior.

Deliverability health

Tarvent also tracks high-level health metrics at the audience level:

DeliverabilityHealthScore – overall sender health for that audience.
DeliverabilityRiskLevel – whether you are in a healthy, warning, or critical state.
DaysSinceLastCampaign – how long it has been since you last sent to that audience.

These metrics help you understand whether gaps in sending or repeated low-engagement campaigns might be harming future inbox placement.

The visual reports you see (trends, distribution charts, etc.) focus on high-level patterns. Specific fields and exact chart labels may evolve over time as we continue improving the reporting experience.

6 Smart filters

Smart filters are pre-built engagement segments that you can use as:

Standalone segments – select a smart filter and immediately target that group.
Rules inside your own segment – combine a smart filter with your existing conditions (fields, tags, groups, and more).

Smart filter categories

Smart filters are organized around common engagement use cases:

Basics – for example, "All active subscribers".
Lifecycle stages – New, Active, At Risk, Dormant, Lost, Reactivated.
Send recommendations – Priority sends, Standard sends, Caution sends, Do not send.
Risk indicators – high churn risk, high unsubscribe risk, high fatigue.
Behavioral segments – VIP engaged, reliable readers, declining engagers, high reengagement priority, and more.
Campaign activity – for example, "Not sent in the last 30 days".

Using smart filters as standalone segments

When building a campaign audience, you can choose a smart filter by itself. Tarvent will automatically include contacts who match that engagement pattern (for example, PrioritySends contacts or AtRiskLifecycle contacts).

Using smart filters inside your own segments

You can also add a smart filter as one rule among many in your own saved segment. This lets you combine engagement behavior with your own data fields, tags, and groups.

Examples:

"VIP Engaged in US" – VIPEngaged smart filter AND Country = United States.
"High reengagement priority for past purchasers" – HighReengagementPriority smart filter AND Tag = Past Customer.
"Newsletter warm segment" – StandardSends smart filter AND Group = Newsletter.

Pro tip: Use smart filters such as PrioritySends, AtRiskLifecycle, or HighReengagementPriority as quick building blocks. They can be used alone or combined with your own fields and tags so you don’t have to recreate complex engagement logic in every new segment or journey.

7 Using engagement in your marketing

Engagement data is most powerful when it shapes who you email, how often you email them, and what you send.

For newer marketers

Start by sending more frequently to PrioritySends and StandardSends contacts.
Reduce frequency or pause sending to CautionSends and DoNotSend groups.
Use a simple reengagement campaign for AtRiskLifecycle and DormantContacts.

For advanced users

Build multi-step journeys that move contacts between segments based on EngagementLevel and EngagementLifecycleStage.
Use HighReengagementPriority to trigger special offers or highly personalized campaigns.
Track audience-level trends to measure whether your strategy is improving engagement over weeks and months.

Over time, you can refine your strategy using both contact-level detail and audience-level trends, allowing Tarvent’s engagement system to guide when, who, and how often you send.