How Three Different Segments Responded To The Same Email and What It Means About How You Send Emails.

In last week’s blog post, I reviewed the success that I had in March with utilizing segmentation to increase open rates, click rates, overall revenue, and revenue/recipient with one of my clients.

However… even with those numbers, this client was concerned because their end of the month sale was performing below expectations.

They were worried that we were missing out on sales by only sending to a smaller segment of our list, rather than the normal segment that they had been using.

So they wanted to send out the last two emails for the sale to the broader segment (180 day openers) to see if they could get more sales.

Spoiler alert… they did. But I’m here to break down the pro’s and con’s of trading off things like open rate and click rate for a little extra revenue.

Also, before we begin I have a few caveats.

Number 1 – these numbers are only from ONE email. A better test would include 5-10 emails with a variety of themes.

Number 2 – this email is the penultimate email for the end of month sale which ran for 2 weeks. So many of our best customers have already purchased and may be a little fatigued with this sale.

Number 3 – the copy in this email is pretty straightforward. Here’s the sale – go get it.

Let’s dive in…

The Three Different Segments

We have three different segments that we are using here.

The first is a 180 openers segment. This is what my client had been using to send emails. This segment is a very broad interpretation of an engaged customer. It includes anyone who has opened an email in the last 180 days, anyone who’s been active on site in the last 26 weeks, or anyone who has ever made a purchase.

The next two segments are my own engaged segments, with a little twist based on client preference.

For my 90-Day engaged segment we started with anyone who’s opened or clicked an email within the last 90 days. Pretty standard. But then I also added anyone who’s been active on site in the last 30 days, anyone who’s joined our list in the last 30 days, or anyone’s who’s made a purchase in the last 90 days.

The 30-Day engaged segment is similar. Just change all of the 90 day windows to 30 and the 30 day active on site window to 14.

Ultimately, these segments became a mix of my standard engaged segment with my active segments. 

This is a good time to reflect on the idea that nothing in marketing is black and white. I start every client with the same basic segments, but then often those segments will morph and change slightly depending on our audience and the client’s preference.

How I Set Up This Test

I wanted to test and see what the different metrics would be if we sent this email to each of the three different segments.

How would each one respond and what would the differences be?

In Klaviyo, you can send a campaign to multiple segments at once. If someone is in more than one segment, they will still only get one email.

Then, once the campaign has been sent, you can view the campaign analytics and look at how each segment responded. (That’s how I got the screenshot at the beginning of the post.)

If you do have subscribers who are in multiple segments, you’ll have some overlap in the data that you’ll need to take into account.

For example, everyone who is in my 30-day engaged segment is also in my 90-day engaged segment, and they are all in the 180 day openers segment.

So when I see that 29 people purchased from the 180 day segment and 25 people purchased from the 30-day segment, that means that there were only 4 people who purchased that were NOT in the 30-day segment.

Opens And Clicks

Let’s start by looking at the opens and clicks for each of the three segments.

30-Day Engaged Segment (32,030 total subscribers)

20,278 total opens with a 63.38% open rate

202 total clicks with a 0.63% click through rate

90-Day Engaged Segment (39,029 total subscribers)

20,587 total opens (307 more than 30-day engaged) with a 52.81% open rate

216 clicks (14 more than 30-day engaged) with a 0.55% click through rate

180 Day Openers Segment (57,333 total subscribers)

20,813 opens (226 more than the 90-day engaged) with a 36.36% open rate

240 clicks (24 more than the 90-day engaged) with a 0.42% click through rate

Here are my big take-a-ways from this…

Number 1 – the open rate for the 180 Day segment is really low. A 36% open rate used to be a good number, but now with the iOS14 and privacy opens, you really want to see your open rates above 50%.

Number 2 – the 180 segment has almost 20K more subscribers than the 90 day segment, but only 226 of those subscribers opened the email. That’s a 1.2% open rate…

Number 3 – BUT… 24 of those 226 clicked the email, which is a 10.6% Click to Open rate… which is really good.

In summary, my standard practice would be to send this email to the 90-day engaged segment and I think the data supports that decision.

Placed Order and Revenue

30-Day Engaged Segment

25 total orders (0.08% placed order rate), 12.4% click to placed order rate

$1187.71 total revenue ($0.04 revenue per recip)

90-Day Engaged Segment

26 total order (0.07% placed order rate), 12% click to placed order rate

$1226.61 total revenue ($0.03 revenue per recip)

180 Day Openers Segment

29 total order (0.05% placed order rate), 12% click to placed order rate

$1531.04 total revenue ($0.026 revenue per recip)

Here are my big take-a-ways from this side of the data…

Number 1 – each segment had a 12% click to placed order rate. Which makes sense because everyone is going to the same product pages and you would expect to see that.

Number 2 – by sending to the 180 day openers segment, we made $305 dollars more than we would have if we only sent to the 90-day openers segment.

So the ultimate question becomes… is $305 worth sending to an extra 20K subscribers?

What We Can Learn

I would say that no it’s not.

For two reasons.

First, there’s a direct added cost to sending to the larger list. That’s because Klaviyo charges your account based on email sends. So if you’re sending to a segment of almost 60K vs a segment of almost 40K, those sends are going to add up.

Based on your profit margin and what you make from each sale, that extra $305 in top line revenue probably isn’t worth the extra sends.

Second, there’s a hidden cost to sending to the larger list. And that’s the penalty that you’re going to pay with deliverability.

I’m not going to get into the finer point of deliverability in today’s post, but suffice it to say that you want to be consistently sending emails that are getting high open rate (above 50% ideally) and good click through rates (the closer to 1% the better).

The more you do this, the better your deliverability gets. The better your deliverability gets, the more emails that land in the inbox. The more emails that land in the inbox, the more revenue you’re going to be able to make in the long run.

What Should YOU Do Next?

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