Engagement rules | Mercleo Docs

Every contact in Reach carries an engagement score, a number from 0 to 1000 built from their recent activity: pageviews, email opens and clicks, event attendance and registration, applications, and more. The score groups into four tiers: Cold, Warm, Hot, and Champion, so you can act on "who's warming up" without reading raw numbers. Reach seeds a default set of scoring rules for every account; account owners and admins can view them at Settings > Reach > Engagement rules, and on plans that include workflow customization, edit them.

Reading a contact's score

Open a contact and go to its Activity tab. The Engagement section leads with the score, a four-step tier ladder, and the two dates that qualify it: Last engaged and Last seen. The ladder's caption names the exact point distance to the next tier (for example "12 points to Hot"), since the tier thresholds are not evenly spaced across the 0–1000 range.

Below the score, a What's driving the score list breaks the total down by rule: each row names the rule, how many times it fired for this contact, and the points it contributed. This list only shows rules with a contribution. It is the direct answer to "why is this score what it is," and it is not the same as the raw interaction counts (pageviews, opens, clicks, and so on) shown above it, which include activity that no rule scores.

A contact with no engagement data yet shows "No engagement data yet. The nightly rollup scores this contact from pageviews, email opens & clicks, and event activity. Check back after it next runs." instead of the score card.

The default rules

The first time you open the Engagement rules page, Reach seeds a canonical set of rules into your account. Seeding is idempotent: revisiting the page never duplicates them. You cannot delete a default rule, but on a plan that includes rule editing you can edit it or switch it off. The defaults are:

Attended an event: trigger attended, +5 on the overall track, 365-day half-life. Enabled.
Registered for an event: trigger registered, +3 on the overall track, 365-day half-life. Enabled.
Submitted an application: trigger applied, +3 on the overall track, 180-day half-life. Enabled.
Clicked an email: trigger clicked, +2 on the overall track, 90-day half-life. Enabled.
Opened an email: trigger opened, +1 on the overall track, 45-day half-life. The half-life is deliberately short: automated opens some email clients generate without the recipient reading anything would otherwise inflate the score for longer than the signal deserves.
Viewed a page: trigger page_viewed, +1 on the overall track, 30-day half-life. Seeded switched off, because raw page views are noisy. Turn it on if you want them to count.

Every rule with a half-life decays: its contribution to the score shrinks by half every half-life period, anchored to when the underlying activity happened, not when it was recorded or last recomputed. A contact who was highly active a year ago and has gone quiet reads as cooling off rather than staying permanently hot.

What a rule is made of

On a plan that includes rule editing, the Add a rule card sits above the Rules table. Each rule has these fields:

Name: a human label shown in the table (for example, Attended an event). Required.
Key: a stable internal identifier. Required; must start with a letter and use only lowercase letters, digits, and underscores (^[a-z][a-z0-9_]*$), up to 64 characters. The key is set when you add the rule and is not editable afterward.
Description: optional free text describing what the rule rewards.
Trigger (activity event): the activity event type that fires the rule, chosen from a dropdown of known types or entered as a custom value (see below). Required.
Track: the scoring track the points land on. Defaults to overall if left blank. Same naming rule as Key (start with a letter; lowercase, digits, underscores).
Score delta: the whole number of points the activity adds. Required. Positive values reward; negative values penalize. The table renders positives with a leading + and negatives in red.
Half-life (days): a decay period, in days, stored on the rule. 0 means the points never decay. Cannot be negative; defaults to 0. In the table, a zero half-life shows as a dash, and any other value as a day count such as 30d.
Enabled: checked by default. A disabled rule does not fire for new activity. You can toggle this from the Rules table at any time without losing the rule.

Choosing a trigger

The Trigger (activity event) dropdown offers a curated shortlist of activity event types: page_viewed, opened, clicked, attended, applied, registered, portal_accessed, viewed_event, viewed_job, donated, and gift_recorded.

If the activity you want to score is not in the list, pick Custom… and type the event type by hand (for example, survey_completed). A custom value must start with a letter and use only lowercase letters, digits, and underscores. The rule fires only when an activity event records that exact type. A typo means it never matches anything.

How and when rules run

Two nightly jobs drive scoring, in sequence. An evaluation job runs daily and turns matching contact activity into recorded engagement facts for every enabled rule; a rollup job runs an hour later and recomputes each affected contact's score, tier, and breakdown from the current rules. A given activity event scores once per rule, so re-running the jobs never double-counts the same event. When several rules match the same activity event, each matching enabled rule fires and the point changes accumulate.

Editing a rule re-scores history

A rule is the current policy; the recorded engagement facts are evidence. When the rollup computes a contact's score, it applies each fact's rule's current point value and half-life, not the value that was in effect when the activity happened. Re-weighting a rule (changing its score delta or half-life) therefore rewrites every contact's history under the new numbers on the next rollup, not just future activity.

Switching a rule off vs archiving it

The Enabled switch in each table row turns a rule on or off. A switched-off rule stays in your list, stops firing for new activity, and its previously recorded facts keep contributing to scores exactly as before. This is how you pause a default rule you cannot delete without touching anyone's current score.

The trash icon archives a rule instead. Archiving hides the rule from the page, and Reach asks you to confirm with "Archive rule "<name>"? It stops scoring new activity. Already-scored engagement facts are kept." The recorded facts are kept in the sense that the underlying rows are not deleted, but an archived rule's facts are excluded from every contact's score going forward. Archiving un-scores that rule's history on the next rollup, which can lower affected contacts' scores and tiers.

What an upgraded plan unlocks

Every plan sees the default rules, read-only, with a Customize engagement scoring with an upgraded plan prompt where the editor would be. The Enabled switches are visible but disabled, and there are no edit or archive controls. Plans that include rule editing get the full editor: add rules, edit names, triggers, tracks, point values, and half-lives, toggle rules on and off, and archive them.

Engagement rules: base plans vs plans with rule editing.

Action	Base plans	With rule editing
View default rules	✓	✓
Add a rule	—	✓
Edit a rule	—	✓
Switch a rule on/off	—	✓
Archive a rule	—	✓

Reference

Tiers. The score is clamped to a whole number between 0 and 1000. Tiers are cold below 10, warm below 50, hot below 150, and champion at 150 and above.

Workflows. A workflows trigger can fire when a contact's score or tier crosses a threshold you set. Because that trigger fires from the same nightly rollup described above, a workflow built on it reacts on the same daily cycle, not the moment the underlying activity happens.

Reporting. An Engagements entity is available when building custom reports, with Track and Month dimensions and Count and Total score measures, if you want engagement trends outside the contact record.

Limits and validation. Rules are account-wide: they apply to all of your contacts, with no per-segment or per-audience scoping. Each rule needs a key that is unique among your live rules: reusing one returns "An engagement rule with key "<key>" already exists for this account." A blank key or name returns "Both key and name are required." A non-whole score delta returns "Score delta must be a whole number.", and a negative half-life returns "Half-life days cannot be negative."