Expand segments, maintain deliverability and reach more people, the smart way.

So you decide to walk the path of light: no blasting of your entire list, but, instead, preserving your deliverability. Even improving it. Or, at least, saving it.                                                                                   

You’ve already segmented engaged customers. It’s much smaller than your full list, but it guarantees good open rates (above 18%), it’s a safe bet and spam filters are starting to like you.

Money is rolling in already, steadily. But there’s still a concern…have you left money on the table? Should you just ignore all the other customers left behind? 

No, you don’t have to. No customer need be left behind.

? Sure, many of them might be gone forever and you might have to let them go. But not all hope is lost. You can still expand your main segment and “hook,” ? *ahem* rescue some of them. Out of the darkness into the light, where they can receive your loving affirmations and discounts once again. 

? Treat your main segment as a living, breathing entity, one that expands and contracts — like a pufferfish. Open rates higher than 18% give you some leeway to “inhale” by including in your send more subscribers. You might select people who engaged over a longer duration, like 100 days instead of 75 or 300 days instead of 250. 

Some of these recipients will respond favorably to you offer, increasing your total engaged. Of course, this is not without a cost. Expanding the list to include those less engaged will, in turn, now lower your open rates. To restore them, you’ll need to reduce your send — “exhaling,” if you will.

Slowly, your engaged list will increase, but not without ups and downs (or “ins” and “outs”). Instead of a smooth, linear progression, it’s more organic — email marketing’s cycle of life.

?The Advanced Reports are Your Stethoscope

How do you know who to “exhale” and who to “inhale”? The Advance Reports and analytics in general will give you a very good “feel” of how nursing your list is going. Maybe you expanded too much and now have to back down. Or maybe you can push it further to the limit. 

Symptoms of a list problem include, not just lower open rates, but spam rates, unsubscribe rates, reduced clicks and revenue and even how your send performed by specific email domain. Often, not all inbox providers show low open rates. It might be just one or two. Perhaps Yahoo sends your campaigns right to the inbox, but Hotmail thinks your spam. You can reduce your send to the latter, thereby increasing Hotmail’s open rates, without having to sedate the entire list.

?Okay, open rates went down, time to back off?

Probably yes, but first let’s look into the Advanced Reports. In this case you can individually tweak email domains via segmentation to back off just where you want to and keep the send list as big as possible.

In one example below, (Image 1), Gmail’s open rate began lagging behind while the others’ remained high.

Image 1, Pre-calibration:

? Instead of downsizing the entire send list, we made the following segment (Image 2). And we excluded it from the upcoming campaigns. 

This allowed us to maintain the same segment size, while downsizing only Gmail. We simply excluded anyone with “@gmail” in their email address who hadn’t opened in the last 60 days.

Image 2, Gmail Excluding Segment:

? The result was immediate. In subsequent campaigns Gmail open rates rose to 33.1% and the email was delivered to more people even though it was sent to fewer Gmail subscribers (Image 3).

Image 3, Post-calibration:

Segmentation is one of the most powerful features of Klaviyo, and the Advanced Reports enable you to tap right into it. To get started, just look at the Advanced Reports from your last few sends to find patterns. Try to formulate some theories as to why your list “breathes” the way it does. 

For your next send, create a segment that will test one of your theories. Then follow-up in Advanced Reports after that, and see if your theory is confirmed. Over time, using Advanced Reports to set up exclusions will become second nature, and your list will steadily grow — like any living organism. 

If you want to know more or have some interesting segmentation examples of your own, just comment below. We’d love to hear from you!

Until next time,

Sócrates Lozano and Thomas McClintock

Hustler Marketing