Segmenting out inactive subscribers from unused email list - best practices?

Hi @Vera Santos!

This is an exciting opportunity, and a great move to make before the holiday marketing rush hits. I’ve had great success in reactivating cold email lists for my clients, with results ranging from 30-80% reactivated depending on how cold the subscribers/ various segments of the list are.

List health evaluation

First thing I’d do is use this tool Emailable. Export all unsuppressed profiles, and run them through this tool. It’ll help you confirm all known deliverable emails, and all known undeliverable emails. 

The undeliverable ones are no use to you, so I’d immediately suppress those. The trickier judgement call comes when evaluating any email identified as “risky” - if you decide to try and reactivate those emails, I’d reach out to this group AFTER the known deliverable emails.

I’m also happy to give you more context to help you decide as you make your way through this. Some emails in the “risky” group can be spam traps, but not all - that’s where the judgment call comes in. 

Here’s a Klaviyo help doc to help you understand spam traps.

When you’re ready to start sending emails to wake people up, here’s what I recommend:

Flows or campaigns? Test with campaigns first, so you can reach out to the “lukewarm” segments and use them to run A/B tests on subject lines, and ID what the winners are so you have the best shot at getting colder people to open your emails. Depending on the sequence you’re wanting to send, you might later end up turning this into a flow.

Warming up your sender reputation: If you have some extra budget to work with, there’s a tool called InboxAlly that I’ve used for several clients, and had good results with so far. There are technical details behind the value of this that I can share if you’re curious, but for now the short version is you get a reputable list of “seed emails” to help you warm up your sender reputation, and build up positive engagement activity for inbox providers like Google to associate with your brand.

Basically, the “seed emails” is a list of email addresses that are tied to bots in the US that will safely and reliably engage with your emails. How this helps you is you would send each campaign to this InboxAlly list at least 4-6 hours before the email is scheduled to send to your true list.

The warmed up sender reputation helps your emails make it into the inbox or Promo tab, and skip the spam folder. That helps your emails get seen, and opened, at a higher rate than you’d otherwise experience with the cold subscribers.

As part of this process, this Klaviyo help doc on deliverability monitoring will be helpful to get familiar with. 

IF you don’t use InboxAlly, I’d focus on starting to send to those deliverable emails that have become inactive within the last 90-120 days. They’re less cold than others, so they’ll most likely “wake up” faster, and that’ll help your sender reputation. 

Then from there, you could reach out as far as the last 180 days, or even the last year. Also, there’s a helpful tool from Google called Postmaster that can help you monitor your sender reputation. 

Hopefully you find this helpful! 

The whole process can feel overwhelming at first, but now’s the perfect time to do it, so you have a bigger segment of active profiles to work with for the holidays!

Warmly,

Gabrielle

Klaviyo Champion & Marketing Lead at ebusiness pros