Seeking Advice: Strategies to Re-Engage an Old 40K Email List

Hi @thepowerofcopy, glad to see you back here in the community.

This is a great question, and something that probably warrants a full guide on activating a dormant List. Here’s what I have done for clients who have a sizable email list that have gone stale. I would love to see other comments from the wider community on how they approach it as well!

When first re-engaging a List, the challenge you are battling is to make sure that your initial emails are well received and have high engagement performance (opens, clicks) and low negative signals (mark as spam, inbox assisted unsubscribes, etc).  This ensures that your emails will have high deliverability and stay out of the “Spam Folder.”

You’ll want to follow the basic principle of “warming up” your List in the same way someone who is migrating to Klaviyo for the first time.  Klaviyo has an excellent guide here: How to ramp and warm your sending infrastructure.

So these are the steps I would start with to determine who my active subscribers in the absence of email engagement data (opens, clicks, etc):

• First, assuming you have other Flows setup in Klaviyo (such as Abandoned Cart, Welcome Series, etc) - use the recent active engaged audience to determine recent engagers.  Since you don’t have any Campaign emails, this might be a small Segment of your 40K List.
• Next, find behavioral events that might indicate that there is a “proof of life.”  Since you haven’t been sending emails, you can’t count on opens, clicks data, but (depending on your Platform) you can look at other data such as Purchases, Checkout Started, or even Visited Website.  Use these events as a proxy to build what you would consider an “Engaged Tier.”  So instead of folks that have open/clicked on an email in the last 60 days, you can mix it in with Visits, Checkouts, Purchases.  This is your “Engaged Tier” and the one that you know definitively are active for your site.
• Furthermore, use the Klaviyo “Profile Created” on date as the best indication of when they signed up.  You may want to add folks that have signed up the most recently as part of your “Engaged Tier.” Or breakup up groups of emails by the dates they signed up.  So you may have a Segment of people who signed up in the last 60 days, between 60 and 180 days, and folks who may have signed up prior to that.  The intuition here is that recently signed up users are more likely to be engaged.
• Finally, you may have other data external to Klaviyo that might be useful.  Check your other CRM tools, your ecommerce platforms, or other ways to know who might be your active users.
• Lastly, you may want to make sure your suppressed Profiles is up to date, double check marketing consent (Opt-ins) and clean out any email addresses you think you think may be dubious.  Some folks may even consider third party List cleaning services to run your email list through, so you can explore that as well. 

Now that you have your initial engagement Tier (or multiple Tiers), start sending Campaign emails to them only (not the whole List).  The nature of the content can vary based on your goals, but typically if an audience hasn’t heard from you (or heard from your brand in a long time), a nice introductory emails similar to the emails you would send in a Welcome Series might be a good approach.  If you can put in an offer or incentive, that would help improve the click and conversion rates too.

Follow the typical warm-up process, if the engagement performance is healthy, you can expand to a wider Tier and repeat the process for those. If performance is still good, you can keep widening the recipient Segments, if performance is poor, then maintain the audience size to the high engagement Tiers only for 3-6 weeks.  After that you can start building proper engagement Tiers based on email performance to maintain your deliverability goals.

I hope this helps!

P.S. Some other threads related to your question here in the community worth checking out:

Thank you all for your input on this. I appreciate it! 🙌🏼 @retention @inboxingmaestro