Last year, I helped a local business selling custom ball markers, head covers, and other accessories for golfers. I built out a couple easy wins — a cart abandonment and browser abandonment sequence to help them recover some lost revenue.
While chatting with the owner, I mentioned one thing we could do is remove unengaged subscribers from his list. Doing this would likely improve his deliverability numbers and lower his monthly ESP bill.
He had no idea this was an option. I’m not surprised. If you’re busy running a store, you don’t have the time to study all the nuances of email marketing or the platforms you use.
I set up a Sunset flow to reengage his list. All the subscribers who didn’t engage were automatically added to an “unengaged” segment so we could supress them in bulk and exclude them from future mailing.
It’s not a perfect solution, but we did see some decent results, especially with his open rates and deliverability scores.
I’m going to tell you all about the setup and the results we got.
Why Email Deliverability Matters
Deliverability isn’t talked about enough. It’s not a sexy topic, like improving open rates or creating behavior-driven automations.
Deliverability is also tough to track. Some email services and operating systems do not track things like opens and clicks. This makes it tough to accurately gauge how good or bad your numbers are.
For example, one of my clients had a subscriber who opened every email we sent and Klaviyo was showing he was unengaged. One of my theories is this is because of the 3rd party email service he’s using.
Because of this, some email marketers choose to ignore these deliverability scores. They think if you suppress your list (remove unengaged subscribers), you’re throwing the baby out with the bath water.
I see where they’re coming from but disagree. Most email marketers agree that scrubbing your list (removing subscribers) is important for list hygiene.
Something else to think about — when you have emails landing in the spam folder and subscribers who are no longer engaging with your emails, this can have a ripple effect. Your deliverability can impact future deliverability. If it’s bad today, you can expect it to get worse as time goes on.
Unless you do something about it.
“But I Don’t Want to Lose Subscribers!”
Losing subscribers is a common concern. It’s not easy to build a list of subscribers so removing them can feel counterintuitive.
Here are a few reasons why it’s a good thing.
- You’re suppressing subscribers who haven’t engaged with your brand. They weren’t reading your emails or buying from you anyway.
- Subscribers cost you money each month. The more subscribers you have, the more you’ll pay your ESP. Removing unengaged subscribers can save you money.
- Keeping unengaged subscribers in your main list is impacting how well your emails are delivered. This also impacts other numbers like opens and clicks, which can impact deliverability.
- Removing unengaged subscribers reduces the odds of someone hitting the spam button. If someone isn’t engaging with your brand, odds are they don’t want to be there, increasing the odds they’ll mark you as spam. So pull them from your list before they can report you.
Keep in mind that when you suppress subscribers, you still have them in your ESP. You just won’t be able to mail them anymore. You also won’t be billed for them.
However, you can activate them again in the future if you want to try to mail them again.
If you don’t want to suppress subscribers, it’s still a good idea to put them through a Sunset flow to see if you can get them to engage with your brand again. And if they don’t, I recommend segmenting them so you can exclude them from future mailings. That way they don’t drag your deliverability down.
Setting Up the Sunset Flow and Unengaged Segment in Klaviyo
There are a couple of moving parts in what I set up for this client.
- Sunset flow
- Unengaged segment
- Manually suppression
Sunset Flow
The objective of the Sunset flow is to get subscribers to engage with your brand — open your emails, click on links, respond, anything at all.
First, you need to set up the rules for what an unengaged subscriber looks like. Here are the parameters I used:
- can receive marketing
- has received at least 25 emails
- has not opened or clicked an email in the last 90 days
- has not added an item to checkout or viewed a product in the last 90 days
- has not been active on the site in the last 90 days
We used 25 emails instead of a time frame since at the time the client wasn’t emailing consistently. That way, we didn’t punish ourselves or the subscribers for our lack of consistency.
Subscribers who meet these parameters are added to our Sunset segment. Once added, they will go through our Sunset flow.
The Sunset flow is 3 emails long. If they engage in any way, they’re removed from the flow. If they don’t engage by the third email, they’re added to an “unengaged” segment.
Unengaged Segment
I set up a segment in Klaviyo called “Unengaged” for all subscribers who do not engage with our Sunset flow.
Creating this segment gives you a few options:
- You can go through the list and manually suppress subscribers one or a few at a time.
- You can suppress everyone in this segment in bulk. This is helpful if you have 100s or 1000s of subscribers you want to suppress at once.
- You can exclude this segment whenever you mail your main list.
We choose to suppress all subscribers in this segment every month or two.
Breaking Down the Numbers
Here are some of the results we saw from this:
- $120-$240 in annual savings (from the client’s ESP)
- Deliverabilty score skyrocketed from a 60 to an 86
- The average open rate jumped from 41.23% (Jan-Sept 24) to 58.70% (Sept-Dec 24)
- Click rate (over a small sample) nearly doubled
Some of these numbers, especially the average open rate, are great. But I won’t pretend that this was all me or that what we did was some kind of wizardry.
He has good engagement with his core audience. He writes good emails and has great products. The unengaged subscribers were simply lowering his numbers.
Meaning, if you have a score of 90, 80, 60, 10, 5 — for an average of 49 — you can improve your average by removing the dead weight. Remove the 10 and 5 and your average is now 76.
That’s all we did here.
It just so happens that doing this seemingly simple task will have a positive, compounding impact on his business.
Your Next Steps
Your first step is to create a segment for unengaged subscribers. Even if you don’t want to suppress them, it’d be worthwhile to exclude them from mailings to see if your deliverability improves. If your open rates and clicks go up and your unsubscribes and complaints go down, you’re on the right track.
That’s all for today. See you next week.