What’s one ‘basic’ tactic or piece of advice you ignored that ended up working?

This is a real straight forward one, or at least now it is, but definitely worth reminding. 

Especially when dealing with lead/acquisition funnels create suppression segments based on engagement. Tweak it to whatever makes most sense for you and your team, but for us it was “has not clicked email or been on site in last 180 days” we then use that as a suppression on nearly all our lead emails to ensure we’re only talking to the leads that are actually likely to convert.

This can then be expanded and applied to list clean up overall or re-engagment campaigns. Becomes very useful when monitoring list health and engagement overall too.

So yeah - put your segments to use, they’re there for a reason and will help you refine your email strategies considerably!

I’m gonna share something super related to what Mike wrote up above (with which I wholeheartedly agree).

For many years, I’ve considered filters and segments to be the same thing, but I’ve recently learned that they are not!

Segments are what you’d look at as strategic slices of your general audience. The simplest way to look at it is through the lens of gender- or age-based segmentation.

If you wanted to target men aged 50 or above with your messaging, for example, you will need deep focus on that segment of your audience. Your creative needs to veer of your median branding line to speak properly to this segment, and your sending cadence and volume need to be adapted to the habits of these people. Even the devices you’re targeting will need to be specific to where this segment consumes content.

Conversely, your filters would be something more tactical, that serves a temporary focus of grouping audience members together because they are most likely to let you fulfill the objective of your send. For example, including only non-purchasers that engaged with email in the past 90 days because your newsletter has a first order discount, would be filtering, and not segmenting, because there’s nothing truly strategic about this decision, it’s just a quick way to maximize your discount uptake while minimizing any unnecessary margin burn.

So, next time when you talk or think about “segmentation”, ask yourself if what you’re describing is just a filter for a temporary objective (e.g. bad quarter needs a performance boost towards the end), or if you are really strategically thinking about your audience (e.g. product A suits women 60+, while product B suits young men).

“Use AI!” 

When ChatGPT started to become a thing, I heard a lot of talk about using it for lifecycle (and other) marketing deliverables, but I brushed it off.

I didn’t think these tools were sophisticated enough to even support the creation of deliverables that myself and my extremely skilled team could do, let alone do it itself.

But… after playing around with CGPT and Claude, it became apparent that these are powerful tools, if used correctly. 

Now, my company, In Social, is actively using AI to support the creation of our deliverables. AI is not perfect, and they’re definitely not replacing our human-led team, but they are helping us expand our thinking, enhance creativity, and improve efficiency - especially across lifecycle!

There is too much to list on how we’re using these tools now, and I know we are only scratching the surface of what we can do, but I am no longer scoffing at the idea that AI is here and actually works (if you know how to use it)!

I know this isn’t really a “tactic,” and I am not completely answering the question, but this is the thing I ignored that I can’t anymore! Use AI in your marketing efforts, and see what it can do for you!

The KISS Principle.

We are all striving to ensure our campaigns are unique and emotionally connect with our communities. It’s very easy to get in your own head about content, messaging and segmentation, the list goes on. I, 100% used to get caught in that trap. Sometimes the Keep It Simple approach could be a text based email from the Founder or in my case, me as the CEO. We find it gets better open and click through rates. Don’t over use it but for those moments when you want to cut through the noise and connect on a personal level, it works.

Ours is less of a tactic and more of something we built into how we work at Flowium: See it, Say it, Fix it.

Early on we would audit a client's account, spot something clearly broken, and stay quiet because it wasn't what we were hired for. Wrong call every time.

Now if anyone on the team sees something off, they say it. Doesn't matter if it's outside scope. A flow filter quietly excluding half the audience, a sunset flow that was never set live, a sending domain with no warmup. We flag it, we fix it.

Some of our best client results had nothing to do with the strategy we were brought in to run. They came from catching the thing that had been sitting there unnoticed for months. It's a simple habit but it changes how you show up for clients.

Completely agree to what ​@MikeKumlin said, and just to add to it with regards to list cleaning when we mention about it to the client. Every client pushes back on it the first time. You tell them to suppress everyone who hasn't opened in 180 days and they look at you like you've lost your mind. They've spent months building that list. Suppressing 30% of it feels like setting money on fire.

But after doing it, open rates go up, deliverability improves, and in a lot of cases revenue from email actually increases because the remaining sends are landing in inboxes instead of spam folders. The list size number was never the thing that mattered. The tactic isn't complicated. It's just hard to convince people to do it until they see it work once.

“Don’t be afraid to email more.”

I used to completely ignore this. We were so cautious about unsubscribes that we’d stick to max. one campaign per day, no exceptions.

But during peak periods (like BFCM), we decided to test Klaviyo’s guidance, and started sending multiple campaigns in a day, including late reminders.

Yes, unsubscribes ticked up slightly. But at our scale (~1M profiles), the incremental sessions and revenue massively outweighed it.

That “extra” send you’re hesitant about? It often captures a completely different slice of your audience.

Simple advice, but it took seeing the data firsthand to actually believe it!

List cleaning.

I avoided it for too long because it feels like you’re shrinking your audience—and giving up future revenue.

In reality, not doing it was quietly killing performance:

• Deliverability suffers
• Signals get noisy
• You optimize against the wrong audience (esp. if you’re sending Klaviyo lists to Meta/Google)

Once we started aggressively suppressing unengaged profiles, everything improved:

• Open and click rates jumped
• Revenue per recipient increased
• Campaign performance became more predictable

You don’t scale email by having a bigger list. You scale it by having a more responsive one (and searching for more people like them).

We do still un-suppress the unengaged contacts during big events like BFCM… and a relatively small portion of them will re-engage.

I love this! 

Honestly, one I ignored early on was “send more emails.” It always felt like bad advice because I didn’t want to annoy people or drive unsubscribes. I over-indexed on being “respectful” of the list instead of thinking about relevance and intent.

What I’ve learned is it’s not about sending less, it’s about sending smarter. Once we started segmenting more aggressively and actually aligning sends to behavior, we increased volume and saw revenue go up without the negative side effects I was worried about. If anything, engagement improved because people were finally getting messages that made sense for where they were in the lifecycle.

I also think a lot of people in this thread are hinting at the same thing in different ways. It’s less about playing it safe and more about trusting the data. If something is working, lean into it even if it goes against your initial instinct.

Big unlock for me was realizing your best customers almost always want to hear from you more, not less. The key is just making sure what you’re sending actually earns the attention.