Keep your list clean, healthy, and strong by re-engaging your unengaged audience, suppressing those that don’t engage, and powerful retargeting tools.

Let’s face it. While we’d love to have each subscriber who joins our list stay a subscriber forever, it just doesn’t happen.

Around 20-25% of your list will disengage each year. Higher if you’re not sending valuable emails to your list.

While your list should grow each month to account for this, you still want to focus on keeping your list cleaned up by trying to re-engage subscribers and eventually removing them from your active list.

It does you no good to keep 50% or more of your list hanging around if they aren’t engaging.

John or Suzy, who hasn’t opened an email in over 6 months isn’t going to randomly open tomorrow’s email just because you have a clever subject line…

Removing John and Suzy will help your overall deliverability, keep costs down, and allow for you to make the most revenue possible from your list.

Here’s how you go about doing this…

Separate Out Customers vs Prospects

To start, we have two main groups within our unengaged segment.

Those who have purchased – Customers.

And those who signed up but never made a purchase – Prospects.

You are going to want to separate out your unengaged segment and treat each of these groups differently.

Why?

It’s always easier to get a second purchase than a first purchase. Even if that subscriber has become disengaged.

So you’re going to want to send different messaging to your un-engaged customer vs your un-engaged prospect.

Let’s start with goal number one. Re-engaging our customers.

Win-Back Emails

Some customers will make a purchase or two and then disengage with your list.

This can happen for a variety of reasons.

Maybe the customer’s problem was solved and they no longer need your product.

Maybe your product is a “one-time purchase” and the customer didn’t see the value in continuing to engage with your emails.

Maybe life happened and your customer’s attention got diverted into family or work matters.

Whatever the reason, you’re going to want to reach out to this sub-segment and try to re-engage them.

I do this with win-back emails.

These can be highly targeted, personal emails that get to the root of why your customer stopped engaging.

Each brand’s strategy will be different depending on your product and ideal customer avatar.

But here are some basic suggestions to get you started.

>>Target specific products or product lines and send cross-sell or upsell emails based on the initial purchase

>>Showcase top selling products, new products, or updates

>>Provide a discount or incentive

>>Connect with other social accounts

>>Provide the option of SMS messaging

The biggest key here is to try and write as many evergreen emails as you can.

Because eventually, you’re going to want to take your best performing emails and turn them into an automated email flow.

Sunset Flow

Once you’ve focused on winning back your previous customers, it’s time to take a look at re-engaging your prospects.

All of these subscribers joined your list for some reason.

But they didn’t buy… and they’ve stopped engaging.

There’s a good chance that they are never going to re-engage.

It’s highly likely that they’ve either found another solution or the reason that they came to your brand in the first place is no longer an issue for them.

However, life does happen and you want to give these prospects a chance to re-engage with your brand before you kick them to the proverbial curb.

Side note: Before you start sending to your unengaged prospects list, you need to have a couple boxes checked. 

First – make sure your deliverability is strong. If you’re getting high open and click-through-rates then sending the occasional email to an unengaged list that’s going to get LOW open and click-through-rates is ok. 

But if your deliverability isn’t strong enough to handle this… it’s not worth it.

Second – make sure you’re sending to small groups of your unengaged prospect segment.

I’ve worked with brands who have 15K, 30K, and even 50K unengaged prospects on their list because it’s never been cleaned.

If we sent an email to 30K unengaged subs at once, it would TANK our sender reputation and deliverability scores.

Ideally you’re going to want this to happen through an automation where you are only sending a couple hundred through per month… but when you’re first starting you are going to want to send these emails to a small sample of your unengaged list.

Here are a few suggestions to get you started with your Sunset emails

>>Focus on pain points that your product solves or the benefits that your product provides

>>Share customer testimonials or case studies

>>Provide an incentive with urgency to make an initial purchase

Again, just like your win-back emails, you’re going to want to turn this into an automation once you have a set of high performing sunset emails that you’ve created and tested.

Monthly Purge

So what are you going to do with those unengaged subscribers who made it through your win-back attempts and sunset emails?

Simple.

Remove them from your active list.

You can do this through mass suppression. Klaviyo will still keep their information, but they will no longer count towards your active subscribers and you won’t be able to send them marketing emails. (You can still send them transactional emails should them come back and make a purchase.)

Doing this monthly or every other month will keep your list trimmed and healthy.

Why do you need a healthy list?

It helps with deliverability.

Reduces your Klaviyo cost. (Or the cost for whichever ESP you choose to use.)

Will result in MORE revenue. It’s not the size of the list that matters, it’s the quality of the people on your list.

Re-Targeting

The awesome thing about keeping all of the data on these former subscribers in your Klaviyo account?

You can re-target them through facebook ads!

Set up specific segments that are only used for ads and look for recently suppressed profiles.

You can even target specifically based on whether they are a former customer or prospect.

You worked hard to get their info. Don’t just trash it and forget about it.

Summary – TL;DR

>>Separate Out Customers vs Prospects

• Who’s bought vs who’s just a window shopper?
• Customers need different messaging than prospects
• First goal – re-engage customers

>>Win-Back Emails

• Targeted toward prior customers
• Showcase top selling products
• Can upsell/cross-sell based on initial purchase
• Turn into an automation – can also be used for engaged customers who haven’t purchased in awhile

>>Sunset Flow

• Targeted toward prospects
• Focus on pain points that your problem solves
• Give an incentive for first purchase
• Turn into an automation

>>Monthly Purge

• Each month, remove unengaged subscribers
• This keeps your list trimmed and healthy
• Not only helps deliverability but also reduced Klaviyo cost

>>Re-Targeting

• Once you suppress unengaged subscribers you still have their info
• Use the Klaviyo and Facebook integration to retarget these customers or prospects through ads.

What Should YOU Do Next?

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