An unengaged segment is a group of subscribers on your email list who haven’t interacted with your emails in a certain period of time. Your definition of unengaged will depend on your sales cycle, but generally, you can consider a subscriber dormant after 3–6 months of inactivity.
If you persist in sending emails to subscribers who aren’t engaging with them, inbox providers may start flagging your messages as spam. As a result, your sender reputation and email deliverability may take a hit, resulting in:
- Low open rates
- Low click rates
- High bounce rates
How to create and manage your unengaged segment
Here’s what you should be doing to manage an unengaged segment:
1. Identify your unengaged subscribers
As previously mentioned, your definition of “unengaged subscribers” is going to depend on your sales cycle. For example, a brand that sells mattresses is going to allow for a lot more time between purchases than a beauty brand would.
But here’s where you can start identifying your unengaged segments:
- Inactive subscribers: These subscribers haven’t opened or clicked any of your emails within your identified time frame.
- One-off engagers: These subscribers engaged with your emails once and haven’t engaged with any of your messages since.
- Non-buyers: These subscribers have been on your list for a long time but haven’t purchased.
2. Re-engage your audience
After you’ve identified your unengaged segments, try to win back their attention before deleting their profiles. Create a re-engagement campaign that targets these segments with one of the following strategies:
- Win-back emails: The purpose of a win-back email is to either re-engage unengaged subscribers or offer them a chance to unsubscribe. Standard win-back emails are friendly reminder emails, we-miss-you emails, last-chance emails, and goodbye emails.
- Customer appreciation emails: Use these emails to reconnect with inactive customers by expressing gratitude and reminding them of your brand. Common examples include thank-you emails, holiday greetings, and birthday wishes.
3. Exclude never-engaged contacts from certain sends
To keep your lists clean and email deliverability high, you’ll want to exclude subscribers who have never engaged with your brand. This is especially important for high-priority campaigns like Black Friday Cyber Monday or new product announcements when you want your emails to reach as many inboxes as possible.
After you’ve created your unengaged segments, your marketing automation platform should make it easy to suppress them from certain emails.
4. Delete your unengaged profiles
If you haven’t been able to win back your unengaged subscribers after a certain number of emails, it’s time to delete them from your database. While it may seem like bad news, regular list cleaning is actually a best practice that improves engagement with people who want to hear from you—so you can feel good about saying goodbye.
With Klaviyo, you can re-engage, suppress, or delete your unengaged subscribers with easy segmentation and list management.
If you’re ready to successfully manage your email list, sign up for Klaviyo and reconnect with your audience.