Insights: Deliverability for Consumer Products (CP) – Emarsys Expert Connect

Overview
Deliverability in the Consumer Products (CP) sector presents unique challenges that differ from ecommerce: engagement signals are weaker, buying cycles are longer, and conversion is less visible. This guide outlines how to adapt established deliverability strategies (such as data lifecycles, engagement-based segmentation, and content preference personalisation) to the CP marketing model.

Objectives of Email in CP

Awareness & Brand Reinforcement: Emails keep the brand top-of-mind through seasonal messaging, product storytelling, lifestyle marketing, and links to media campaign.
Driving Engagement: Clicks, web traffic, app visits, social sharing, in-person events, or participation in contests/promotions.
Collecting First-Party Data: Encouraging email and digital messaging sign-ups, premium member subscription, preference and demographic collection, app downloads and survey completion to enrich customer profile.

Example: A consumer signs up to enter a “Win a Year of Your Product" campaign. Email follow-ups may invite them to vote on new flavors, colours or features; share content on social media, or download a campaign-specific app.

Understanding Engagement in CP

CP lacks the clear commercial journey and traceability (message → browse → buy) seen in ecommerce. Engagement may be more subtle:

Clicking on a new product launch email
Participating in a campaign microsite or survey
Visiting a product or event website
Interacting via a loyalty app
Registering product packaging codes on "FMCG"
Watching and sharing social media

Tip: Work with marketing teams to define trackable engagement signals beyond email clicks - e.g., web activity, app logins, loyalty card use, competition entries, QR code scans, social interactions.

Common CP Challenges in Deliverability

Lack of Data: Cannot track supermarket purchases, free event attendance, anonymous online interactions. Disconnection between the promotion and subsequent engagement or purchase
Too much Data: Online, offline, app, social, email, event, demographic, engagement, read, view, listen, watch, attend, sales... drowning in lakes of data which cannot be connected meaningfully
One-off interaction: Contacts may participate a single campaign and never engage again.
Low Engagement: Awareness or participation doesn't always need a click-through, or engagement through a trackable process.
Data Quality: List growth driven by one-off events, competitions, surveys and promotions can lead to unqualified sign-ups and temporary or fake email and contact details.
Disconnected Purchase Signals: Brands may only see the retail purchase figures, and be unable to see the cause or reason for change.

Deliverability Requirements

(What mailbox providers, such as Like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft Expect)

Clean Lists: Validate new data. Remove unengaged users, typos and bounces.
Engagement-Based Segmentation: Adapt frequency based on activity.
Relevant Content: Send email content recipients want, expect and interact with.
Consent & Lifecycle Alignment: Don’t retain data longer than needed.

These expectations are not optional - meeting them is necessary to avoid being filtered to spam.

Engagement-Based Email Frequency for CP

In comparison to ecommerce and retail, which has clear engagement tracking, direct CTAs and immediate and repeat purchase; CP engagement is harder to track, has a longer lifecycle, and fewer opportunities for an immediate CTA response. This means a cautious approach is needed to sending.

As a general rule, emails per month should decline as engagement drops.

Please refer to this guide for a benchmark to follow, and refine to your needs:

🔗 Email Frequency Guide for Ecommerce, CP, and B2B

Practical Deliverability Advice for CP

1. Monitor Activity Beyond Email - Understand your Engagement
Establish alternate engagement sources: app logins, loyalty use, social shares. Make sure your platform can track or import these signals. Feed these signals into your strategy, targeting, segmentation and frequency caps.

2. Label and Score Contacts
Assign tags or scores for each type of engagement: contest entry, QR scan, app activity. Use this to guide targeting. What type of engagement most aligns with your objectives? What signals need follow-up? What missing signals mean additional targeting is needed? How do you define and identify a defecting customer and an inactive one?

3. Define Lifecycle in Privacy Policy

Define a data lifecycle. Decide and justify the duration to retain and process data. Publish this information in your public privacy notices, as this makes it official and helps keep your teams aligned. Make it clear during sign-up how long data will be stored and used for each specific purpose (event sign-ups vs sign-up for life!).

Tip: Use "short-term by default" consent language (e.g. “You’ll receive updates until the end of the promotion, then you can choose if we stay in touch”).
Link to a full privacy notice that includes your data retention practices.

4. Work Cross-Channel
CP can never work in email alone. Use push, SMS, social, web and offline to encourage cross-signup and cross-engagement. Avoid overloading dormant contacts with email when social reach can be used

5. Clean and Sunset Data
Inactive data needs to be removed systematically. Long-term inactive prospects who’ve never engaged should be deleted sooner than customers who previously interacted. This process can be made smarter by identifying typos and invalid signups in the first few weeks - allowing you to remove this invalid data in a few weeks instead of a couple of years. Read more here:

🔗 How and why to perform early validation of signups

When Deliverability Issues Arise

Deliverability issues (blocks, bounces, reputation, spam-folder delivery) is almost always caused by data issues - either Use the framework above to guide corrective action:

List Quality: Validate new data, and stop sending to "dead" contacts.
Frequency: Reduce sends to inactive contacts.
Re-engagement: Launch a win-back campaign to those with some past activity.
Revalidation: On apps and logged-in websites, allow contact details to be viewed and corrected.
Removal: Define retention and deletion policies. Put them into practice.

Summary

Despite the objectives of CP being quite different to retail and ecommerce, when sending email, the good practice policies and practices to follow are largely this same. This is because we have to adhere to the well-established email sending requirements. Email has effective self-regulatory measures to protect the inbox and ensure brands send the content wanted and expected by recipients.

To succeed in CP email deliverability: