• Part 1: Email Automation Flows
• Part 2: Email Campaigns That Convert
• Part 3: Email Deliverability & Email List Hygiene

You can’t control tariffs, but you can control your email segmentation strategy. Uncertainty around tariffs is driving costs up, and making awkward customer conversations necessary.

But an effective email segmentation strategy is one of the best tools you have to soften the blow. Rather than blasting a generic “sorry, prices went up” email, brands that segment by location, purchase history, and price sensitivity can reframe a negative into a moment of trust.

What Tariffs Actually Mean for Ecommerce

Before we get to email segmentation strategy, let’s clarify the impact we’re trying to mitigate.

Tariffs (like the recent increases on Chinese imports) raise the cost of goods. If your business sources products or components from overseas, your COGS (cost of goods sold) goes up. This often means one of three things:

• You raise prices.
• You reduce margins.
• You cut corners on quality, shipping, or packaging.

Most brands pick the first. But price hikes come with a cost, especially when announced poorly. That’s where smart segmentation matters.

The Wrong Way: One Email, One Panic

Many brands send a single price hike email to their entire list. It usually reads something like:

“Due to rising costs, we’re increasing our prices starting next week. We appreciate your understanding.”

It’s vague and impersonal. And it will frustrate many of your customers. Worse, it treats loyal, casual, high-value and price-sensitive customers all as one segment. But their reactions most definitely will not be the same.

If you want to preserve trust (and revenue), you need to segment strategically.

Email Segmentation Strategy: 3 Key Tips for Tariff Uncertainty

Let’s break this down into actionable segmentation strategies.

1: Location: Speak Directly to Affected Customers

Tariffs are often country-specific, and sometimes even region-specific. If only your US customers are affected, don’t send a price change notice to your international audience. And within the US, if tariffs disproportionately impact certain states or zip codes (based on local fulfilment hubs or product distribution), tailor your outreach accordingly.

Tactical tip:

Use your email service provider (ESP) to create a segment of US-based customers (or wherever the tariff applies) and adjust your message for them. Start your email with clarity:

“Hey {{ first_name }}, a quick update for our U.S. customers…”

Then clearly explain:

• What’s changing: “Starting October 1st, select imported goods will reflect a 6-10% price increase.”
• Why: “This is due to new tariffs on specific product categories.
• What’s not changing: “Shipping policies, domestic product pricing, and your loyalty rewards remain the same.”

If your fulfilment or manufacturing varies by region, you can go deeper. Let customers in unaffected areas know they’re safe from price changes.

2: Purchase History: Reward Loyalty with Advance Access or Bundles

If someone just bought from you, they’re invested. If they’ve bought from you 5+ times, or part of your loyalty program, they’re a brand advocate. These customers are more likely to understand pricing realities, but they still deserve context and appreciation.

Instead of a cold announcement, give them a heads up with beneifts.

Segment: Repeat customers (2+ purchases in the last 12 months), loyalty program members, or customers with high total spend or above-average order value (AOV).

Email Angle (2 Approaches)

Option 1: Transparency & Fairness

“You’ve come a long way with us, and we truly value your support. That’s why we want to be transparent: due to rising import costs, select prices will change starting October 1st. You have until then to shop at the current price.”

• Communicates appreciation and clarity.
• Sets a hard deadline to encourage action.
• Feels honest, not promotional.

Option 2: Loyalty as Early Access

“You’ve been with us a while, so we wanted to give you a heads up”.

• Let readers shop current pricing before it goes up.
• Offer bundle deals to help them stock up.
• Frame this as a loyalty perk: 48-hour early access before prices change.

3: Price Sensitivity: Cushion the Blow With Alternatives

You likely have customers who always buy when there’s a sale, use discounts, or shop lower-tier SKUs. These shoppers are price sensitives. So they’re most at risk of churnin after a tariff-driven price increase.

This is where your email segmentation strategy can pay dividends.

How to identify them:

• Always use discount codes.
• Only purchase during major sales.
• High cart abandonment rate on full-price items.

What to send them:

• Lower-cost alternatives in the same category (“If X is out of budget, here’s Y.”)
• Upcoming sale calendar or loyalty perks.
• Subscription or bundle options that lock in current pricing.

Email snippet:

“We know price matters. So we’ve put together a few ways to keep your routine going without breaking the bank…”

The goal is to retain, not upsell. Think: helpful, not defensive. And it’s also a great opportunity to invite price-sensitive customers into your loyalty program, where they can save more and get access to exclusive deals that help stretch their budget further.

Bonus: Combine Email Segments for Precision Outreach

You don’t have to stop at one segmentation filter. Some email service providers (ESPs) like Klaviyo let you stack rules.

You can try:

• Location + purchase history: “US-based VIPs”
• Price sensitivity + recent cart activity: “At-risk bargain shoppers”
• Email engagement: “Opened or clicked in the past 90 days”.

Then tailor the tone. Your high-value US customers can get a softer, more collaborative message:

“As one of your most valued customers, we wanted you to hear it from us first…”

Whereas price-sensitive customers might get practical help:

“We’ve found a few cost-effective swaps that might work even better.”

What You Gain From a Smart Email Segmentation Strategy

Tariffs aren’t your fault. But how you communicate about them is your responsibility. Smart segmentation helps you to:

• Reduce unsubscribes and complaints.
• Keep high-value customers informed, not blindsided.
• Prevent churn from price-sensitive segments.
• Maintain brand trust during volatility.
• Even drive sales with tactical urgency.

Tariffs Are a Trust Test: Email Segmentation Strategy Helps You Pass

In some ways, tariffs are a stress test for your email strategy. They reveal whether you treat your list like one amorphous blog, or a group of real people with different habits and expectations.

Email segmentation strategy isn’t just a revenue tactic, or a way to make work for your email marketing team. It’s how you match the right messaging to the right parts of your audience. Getting it right is a great way to show that you respect the community you’re cultivating around your brand.

If you’re rethinking how to talk to your list during tariff season, we’ll help you do it with strategy, not stress. Book a call and let us help you get this right.

Keep reading for insights on how email automation can protect revenue through this uncertain period.

This article is part 1 of 6 in our Tariff Survival Guide for eCommerce Marketers.

• Part 2: Email Campaigns That Convert
• Part 3: Email Deliverability & Email List Hygiene
• Part 4: Email Segmentation
• Part 5: Email Design & Email Copywriting
• Part 6: Customer Loyalty Programs

Key Takeaways

• Tariffs are creating friction for eCommerce businesses: products are costing more, and taking longer to ship.
• Email automation is key to mitigating the impact by strengthening trust and keeping sales consistent.
• Focus on essential email automation flows: Welcome. Abandoned Cart, Shipping Delay, Back-in-Stock, Post-Purchase to cover the whole customer journey.

What Can eCommerce Stores Do About Tariffs?

With tariffs back in the news and supply chain disruptions causing headaches for eCommerce businesses, it’s safe to say everyone is feeling the pressure. Product costs are rising, and delays are holding inventory up. Customers are also more sensitive to change than usual.

It’s a lot, and it probably feels that way. The good news for eCommerce marketers is that there are a few critical levers you can pull, especially when it comes to how you connect with your customers.

Strengthen Trust & Loyalty With Intelligent Email Automations and Flows

The market is rocky. Customers know that, and right now, they’re looking for consistency. With prices trending upward almost everywhere,

• If you’ve increased prices, have you been transparent about it?
• Did you communicate clearly to keep people in the loop?
• Are you making the shopping experience easy, and minimizing the impact of delays for customers?

Brands who show up for their customers now will earn loyalty that lasts beyond any (hopefully temporary) turbulence.

It’s also time to double down on whatever brought them to your brand to begin with. That’s bigger than price. And in some cases, it’s even bigger than your product. It’s about how you’ve made them feel, and how well you can keep hitting the right notes to keep them coming back.

Let Email Automation Do the Heavy Lifting

With so many variables in play, eCommerce brands need all the help they can get. An email automation delivers in spades, especially when the sailing isn’t smooth.

With the right email workflow automation in place, you really can have it all:

• Keep your brand top-of-mine.
• Nurture trust among your most valuable customers.
• Expand your list and drive sales to soften the impact of price hikes.

In this article, we’re breaking down the essential automated email campaigns you should prioritize protect you customer experience and your revenue, even (and especially) when you’re thrown a curveball like historic changes in tariffs.

The Email Automation Flows That Keep Revenue…Flowing (Even When Prices Go Up)

1: The Welcome Flow

What’s the point of this email automation?

Your welcome email flow is the first and most important opportunity you get to roll out the red carpet. It’s a series of emails that greet new subscribers and introduce them to your brand.

First impressions are always everything. But right now, they’re extra everything. In more certain times, you can afford to be a little brand-centric in your welcome flow. But right now, you need customers to feel like they’re getting real value, right from the start. You want to keep their minds on value, and off things like pricing jitters or concerns about shipping. This might call for some adjustments to your messaging and design.

How to structure a high-converting welcome email flow

• Email 1: A warm welcome (obviously), plus some follow-up if you offered something in a popup. The goal here isn’t necessarily to talk about your brand, but let readers know they’re in good hands (and prove it).
• Email 2: Readers who open this one are interested in learning more. Now’s the time to spotlight what sets you apart. Talk about your quality, your values. Whatever your strong suit is, make it shine here.
• Email 3: Set clear expectations around shipping times, especially if you’re expecting delays. If you have to deliver this kind of bad news, it’s best to do it early, and do it transparently.

Personalization matters, too. Tailor these emails as much as you can based on user behavior and preferences. But even more importantly, you should aim to remove any uncertainty the reader may have had before subscribing.

Tweaking your welcome flow can improve email revenue by 1563%. Get our welcome flow deep dive to find out how.

2: The Abandoned Cart Flow

Why this email automation belongs on the essential list

Carts get abandoned. A well-crafted abandoned cart email automation wins them back. This series is an event-based email automation that triggers when a customer loads up their cart, and then ghosts.

You can expect that to happen more than usual at the moment: tariffs and supply chain hiccups are causing major buyer hesitation. That makes getting your abandoned cart email flow in ship shape should be high up on your priority list.

What an effective abandoned cart flow looks like

• Email 1: A reminder, but not a nag. The usual messaging about “forgetting” the cart may be a little less relevant right now. Instead, focus on value and urgency.
• Email 2: Bring in some social proof to nudge readers back to checkout. Pick some great reviews or UGC to feature. It’s a good idea to pick examples where customers explain why they’re happy. In other words, real-world problem solving is worth more than the 5-star widget.
• Email 3: This is an ideal place to throw in a limited-time bonus or discount. This is standard practice anyway, but in 2025 it’s a no-brainer.

Is your abandoned cart email flow recovering revenue? Find out how to net 6% or more with intelligent, engaging email automation that brings customers back to checkout.

3: The Shipping Delay Flow

An email automation that gives your readers full transparency

Shipping delays damage trust. But unexpected shipping delays damage it beyond repair. This flow is a good way to keep your customers in the loop, so they don’t get any nasty surprises after purchasing.

Proactive, honest updates show your customers that you respect their time (and their money). Brands who make this effort will have a much greater chance of riding out tariff-induced uncertainty with their lists in good shape.

Building a shipping delay email flow that leaves customers curious, not irritated

• Email 1: Break the news. Be upfront about the delay, and share an updated timeline.
• Email 2: A sincere apology, perhaps pairs with a little perk (free or discounted shipping, bonus points, or some other value add).
• Email 3: Confirm once the order ships, and give detailed tracking information for peace of mind.

4: The Back in Stock Flow

Inviting customers to get it before it’s gone (again)

One of the very few silver linings of supply chain chaos is that it reminds customers that they can’t take their favorite products for granted. Hearing that something is back in stock is more compelling when you’re not sure when it will be back again. Capitalize on that with an email automation that alerts customers when out-of-stock products are back and ready to ship.

Back-in-Stock alert can be a golden ticket to recover lost sales. Plus, you’re reaching out to people who already wanted what you’re selling, a (relatively) easy win.

How to craft back in stock email flows that don’t sound gimmicky

• Email 1: Announce the big news, but don’t spend too much email space telling a story about the product. The point here is scarcity and urgency. Make the CTA stand out.
• Email 2: Remind subscribers who have purchased the product in the past why they loved it in the first place. Emphasize benefits, don’t dwell on features.
• Email 3: Urgency is key here. Tell readers that stock is limited (as long as that’s true).

Segment your audience based on product interest to make these alerts hyper-relevant and more effective.

Get our full guide to setting up back in stock emails using Klaviyo flows.

The Post-Purchase Flow

Preserving purchase momentum by letting customers know they’re more than a number

This email automation flow keeps the conversation going after the sale. You want customers who read this to see that you actually value their business. It’s also an opportunity to present more products that align with their interests and increase CLV.

Post-purchase emails that keep buyers coming back for more

• Email 1: Short and sweet. This should be a heartfelt thank you, with a confirmation of order details.
• Email 2: Smart recommendations for complementary products, refills or upgrades.
• Email 3: A gentle review request, or an invite to join your loyalty program.

The emails in this flow don’t need to be long. But they do need to make an impact. Customers who open them should feel reassured, then excited, then a desire to share their experience (even if that comes from a little incentive).

Email Automation: Your Tariff-Time Lifeline

We’ve helped eCommerce brands successfully adjust their email marketing automation strategies to handle uncertain times.

If you’re looking to tighten up your email workflow automation, recover abandoned carts, or master integrating email automation with CRM systems, we’ve got you.

Talk to an email automation expert to protect your retention revenue.

In the next chapter of our series, we’ll dive into Campaigns That Convert When Costs Go Up: email strategies that focus on turning tariff-driven cost hikes into revenue-generating opportunities.

Smart, right?

Well, maybe not.

Depending on how your setup works, you might be excluding real customers across your campaigns. Even worse, you could be misattributing revenue in flows, while those same profiles still enter the automation. Either way, you’re getting an inconsistent picture of performance, and you may be losing out on real revenue.

In this blog, we’ll break down how inbox security systems can skew your email data, and what that means for your revenue attribution. We’ll also look at why some filters might be doing more harm than good.

So What are Bot Clicks, Really?

On most email platforms (like Klaviyo), a bot click is a link click that appears to come from a non-human interaction, like a script or automated process.

But not all “bot clicks” come from actual bots.

Some inbox providers, like Gmail or corporate email servers, use security filters that automatically click every link in incoming emails. This is a safety measure to scan for malicious content.

The problem is that email service providers (ESPs) can’t always tell the difference. If a security system clicks a link on behalf of a human user, Klaviyo still logs it as a bot click and flags the profile. That usually leads to removing the profile from the list.

So, even if that real customer opens, reads, and purchases later…you might never email them again. They’re on the bot list, and they won’t get future email marketing campaigns and email marketing flows.

When Bot Clicks Exclusion Goes Wrong: Real Revenue Horror Stories

We recently helped a store who had changed their attribution model from 3 to 5 days. They had also begun to exclude bot clicks, which they had not done before.

A couple of totally predictable things happened:

1. Email-attributed revenue dropped. This is inevitable, because Klaviyo was now linking less revenue to emails.
2. Engagement also dropped. Again, this was not surprising: at least some of the opens they had been getting were genuine bot clicks and machine opens.

But then we noticed something far more important: website sessions coming from Klaviyo also dropped.

After digging in, we found that the majority (yes, MAJORITY) of these profiles were real customers. They had been engaging and shopping with the brand before the change. But the bot clicks exclusion had cut them out of all email communication.

These exclusions were cutting valuable (human) subscribers out of the loop. These were profiles who had:

• Opened multiple emails
• Clicked multiple links (beyond the security auto-clicks)
• Completed purchases

They weren’t bot clicks. They were buyers.

Here’s an example of a profile that ended up on the exclusion list, even though there was a purchase history for the profile.

Okay, that looks like a pretty small order. Maybe the data clarity we got from excluding bot clicks was worth it?

Not quite. Here’s another example, but this time a loyal customer whose profile had triggered clickbot=true.

Imagine the impact of this kind of thing at scale. Excluding hundreds or even thousands of active profiles based on inaccurate bot identification could wreck your attribution model and flatten your revenue.

We even found a new customer who had converted via the welcome flow. After entering that flow, the system misidentified it as a bot click. This customer wouldn’t get any more future communication. And the brand would have cheated itself out of repurchase revenue.

Apple Privacy Opens: The Other Silent Revenue Killer

It’s not just bot clicks that brands need to worry about.

Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) makes a complex picture even messier. It preloads email content on Apple devices, even if the recipient never opens the message.

That means:

• Opens appear as “machine activity”
• Klaviyo (and other ESPs) can’t always tell if the recipient actually read the mail
• Some marketers choose to exclude Apple Privacy opens from email flows and email campaigns

But again, this can be dangerous.

It’s possible for a recent customer to end up in the “machine opens” category. So, if you exclude Apple Privacy Opens from your sends, you could be excluding active customers and losing out on revenue.

Here’s an example of a one-time customer that the system thinks is a machine open, even though they have placed an order.

At the end of the day, it’s better to have slightly noisy data than to lose out on revenue opportunities.

One of our expert email marketing strategists, Liana Mouradian, puts it like this:

“Consistency is more important than precision. If your metrics stay stable over time, even with some inflation, you’ll still spot the trends that matter.”

So Should You Ever Exclude Bot Clicks?

Yes, but only strategically.

In some rare cases, filtering might be necessary:

• During a list bombing attack
• If you notice a surge of invalid or junk profiles
• If a deliverability consultant recommends it for list hygiene or domain health reasons

But even then, proceed with caution. Flagging a security filter as a bot is a blunt tool. Unless you’re pairing it with additional signals, like no site activity, no purchase behavior, or hard bounces, you could be throwing out valuable profiles.

How to Check if You’re Excluding Real Customers

Here’s what we recommend for every Klaviyo user:

1: Audit your bot clicks regularly

Go into your database and identify any profiles triggering the bot classification. Check if they:

• Have a purchase history
• Engaged with multiple emails
• Revisited your site

You can establish this by segmenting these profiles. For example, filter for profiles that met “clickbot=true in the last 30 days” AND have ever placed an order. Those are customers, so keep them.

For active subscribers, you can segment further by digging into engagement levels like “active on site,” and “viewed product”.

We recommend having these botclick+MPP segments in place, and monitoring them regularly.

2: Don’t panic over inflated open/click rates

It’s a trade-off. Yes, some metrics may appear inflated. But excluding too aggressively can cost you more than just some messy data.

• Use engagement and conversion data: Look beyond opens and clicks. Track sessions, add-to-carts, and purchases to get a fuller picture.
• Validate before excluding: If a profile is flagged but has a recent purchase or strong behavioral signals, reconsider excluding it.
• Adjust segmentation logic: For example, instead of excluding all Apply Privacy Opens, exclude only those with no other engagement for 90+ days.

Don’t Let “Clean Data” Kill Your Conversions

Email marketing is messy. Between bots, privacy tools, and engagement filters, it’s hard to know what’s real and what’s noise.

But we’ve learned that over-correcting is just as dangerous as under-analyzing. The best move is a balanced, evidence-based segmentation strategy that combines behavioral signals, clear exclusion logic, and ongoing monitoring.

If you’re not sure whether you’re excluding the right profiles (or the wrong ones), Hustler Marketing can help you audit your lists, segments, attribution settings and engagement filters to make sure you’re not ghosting your best customers.

Talk to our expert team about how to clean up your email data without sacrificing revenue.

That’s because, obviously, you can only make a sale if someone opens your emails. And eCommerce email marketing is, in large part, a numbers game. To win, you need to send enough emails, of high enough quality, to get the opens that lead to sales. 

So with that in mind, what is a good open rate for email? In particular, what’s a good open rate (OR) for eCommerce – and how can you improve yours to boost email marketing revenue?

All great questions – and all tricky to answer in brief. But here’s the TL;DR if you’re not in the mood to read to the end:

• Set realistic expectations based on your industry and your niche within it.
• Invest in killer email subject lines (and preheaders).
• The right email list segmentation makes the difference between “viral” and “invisible”.
• Figure out the best email send times for your audience – it may not be what you think.

What is the Average Email Open Rate?

(Also: how long is a piece of string?)

We’re often asked for an average email open rate, to compare against actual rates.

It’s an important question, but it really depends on the industry and niche that you’re working in. Email marketing works differently in each one – and even within industries, certain segments get better average open rates than others. 

According to the latest Klaviyo data, there’s a non-trivial variance in campaign open rates different eCommerce segments:

• Clothing & Accessories: 40.48%
• Food & Beverage: 40.58%
• Health & Beauty: 37.82%
• Office Supplies: 37.79%
• Specialty: 50%

Their data puts the average at 39.74%. Bear in mind that this includes the impact of iOS updates, which really inflate open rates. So if your email open rates are somewhere in the 30’s, you’re doing okay. It could be a lot worse. But it could be a lot better, too, which is where a done-for-you email marketing service can make all the difference in the world (more on that a little later).

What’s the open rate formula?

Here’s how to calculate open rate figures for your monthly KPI report or that email marketing deep dive your CEO is bugging you about:

To calculate the email open rate, divide the number of emails that were opened by the total number of emails that were successfully delivered (not bounced). Then, multiply that result by 100 to get the percentage.

For example, if you sent 1,000 emails and 200 of them were opened, your open rate would be 20% (and your CEO will have some questions for you).

The open rate formula is pretty simple, but getting it to a healthier place takes time.

Here are some fixes to consider if you’re stuck at or below the average email open rate for your niche. 

How to Increase Email Open Rates: 4 Proven Strategies

Send More: Increase Email Frequency To Get More Opens

There’s no hard and fast rule about how many emails an eCommerce store should send. But “at least once a week” is a general rule of thumb. 

The more you send, the more data you have to analyze to find opportunities and spot anomalies. For example, if you notice that a certain send time correlates with a big drop in opens, that’s important. Change things up and find a better time for your audience. 

Basically, your subscribers’ behavior can tell you as much as a direct survey (if not more). You just need to be paying attention, and know how to interpret it. 

And you can only get to the point of having useful data on their behavior if you’re sending at a high enough volume.

Write Engaging Email Subject Lines – You Only Get One Chance (and 50 characters)

The email subject line is the first thing your recipients see. You have a very short space (around 50 characters) to get attention and motivate the click. And we’re all getting tired of cliche, gimmicky or overly aggressive email subject lines cluttering our inboxes. 

Here’s what you want to do instead:

• Personalize where you can. Adding a recipient’s name can be a nice touch – even if it is a little predictable.
• Keep it short: pack as much as you can into the character limit.
• Ensure that there’s follow-through from the subject line to the email content. 

Remember: you’re writing email marketing subject lines, not email subject lines for internal communication. So your focus should always be on what your audience needs. Sometimes that’s humor (great for nurturing content and newsletters). But sometimes it’s more about giving as much information as possible in 50 short characters, like during a sale. 

Pack Value Into Your Email Preheader Text, Too

The preheader text gives the reader a little more context about what’s in the email. Use this space wisely: highlight an offer, a unique selling point, or a teaser that complements the subject line. Think of it as your last shot at convincing the reader to click – not as just something else you need to fill in.

Most email clients display preheader text between 30 and 75 characters on mobile devices, while desktop clients can show up to 130 characters. To ensure visibility, we recommend that you keep preheaders between 40 and 100 characters.

Segment Your Email List

If you have great subject lines and engaging content, but your email open rates still aren’t as high as you’d like, you could be segmenting your list wrong.

Segmentation is kind of a science in itself, so it’s very easy to make mistakes that end up sabotaging your email revenue. Here are some of the biggest:

Over-Segmentation: Creating too many small, niche segments can water down your messaging (and make your email marketing team’s life more difficult without any gain in revenue).

Outdated Segments: Your email list is always changing, and so should your segments. Update them regularly as customers move through different stage of their customer lifecycle with you. But be careful: if you update your segmentation logic too frequently, the result could be duplication or confused messaging.

Only Using Demographics: Demographics like age, gender and location are an obvious starting point for segmentation. But there’s even more to consider, like behavioral and transactional data: purchase history, browsing habits, and others. This means digging into your GA4 data (daunting, we know, but worth it).

Failing to Exclude Customers: Forgetting to exclude certain segments, like sending a “Welcome” email to loyal customers or a “First Purchase Discount” to someone who just bought will irritate readers and skyrocket unsubscribe rates.

Optimize Your Email Send Times

It’s easy to assume that nobody will read your emails on a Monday morning, or that everyone will open at noon on a Wednesday because that’s what the latest industry guide says.

The truth is that this is one of the more dynamic parts of email marketing. So, don’t reach any conclusions until you test and analyze the best times to send your emails. Depending on your audience, certain days and times might give better open rates. And sometimes, it’s not the times you expect. We’ve got amazing results from a Sunday afternoon send. It’s all about your audience – so put in the work to find out what they like.

Sign Up for Our Email Marketing Newsletter

(And open it – just once a month, promise).

Get the inside track on email marketing trends and winning strategies with our monthly Hustler Marketing newsletter. We won’t tell you what our average open rate is, but we will share our knowledge and hard-won expertise to help you skyrocket yours!

Like most digital tools, email is evolving with changing and improving technology. Until a  decade ago, it was difficult to imagine embedding video into an email or having interactive emails. Now, with the advent of AI, tasks that would have taken email marketers hours to complete can happen in seconds. That’s changing the game in serious ways, and helping email agencies to make their email marketing services even more impactful.

Using AI in email marketing allows email agencies to shortcut the process of turning data into deep insights like:

• Which subject lines are performing the best, and why.
• The times of day that your recipients are most likely to open emails.
• Optimal frequency of emails for your audience.
• New segments that you should include in your email list.
• How deeply your readers are engaging with each email.
  

Let’s look at the key benefits that AI enables for email marketers, and what they mean in practice.

Benefits of AI for Email Marketing

1. AI Helps Personalize Emails 

Personalization can mean the difference between a successful email marketing strategy and one that’s simply a waste of time. Emails with a personalized subject line tend to do a lot better in inboxes, according to a study by Campaign Monitor:

• They’re 26% more likely to get an open.
• They get 6x higher transaction rates.

AI can make personalization easier, by reading users’ behavior, habits, interests, and level of engagement. It then uses that information to determine the best product recommendations, discounts, and subjects for each recipient. For example, if someone visits your website and looks at a certain product but decides to not buy, AI can retarget the potential customer via email through your “Abandoned Cart” flow. 

Crucially, an AI system can do this in just moments, without any human guidance.

2. AI Helps in the Optimization of Email Subject Lines

When you’re optimizing an email, your subject lines are key. A good email subject line encourages customers to click through and read the email, or at least skim it. AI can help by tailoring subject lines with the use of natural language generation. With enough training, an AI system can also learn the brand tone of voice, and draft subject lines align with it. 

3. AI Helps automate email copywriting

The benefits of AI in email marketing don’t stop at the subject line. In fact, you can use AI copywriting tools to optimize the entire content of your email. AI software can digest copy, images, promotions, blog posts, and links to generate optimized emails for a high engagement rate. This type of automation cuts down the time and resources it takes to scale up your email channel.

How Klaviyo Leverages AI to Improve Email Results

As a Klaviyo Elite Master Partner agency, we regularly make use of the platform’s AI-enhanced capabilities. Here are some of the most important ones for email marketers to understand. 

1. Predictive Analytics:

AI and auto-generated predictive analytics enable personalization at scale, by generating insights through journey tracking and forecasting. This makes it easy to segment and automate communication based on customer behavior. Some of the analytics you can predict are:

• next order date
• lifetime value
• churn risk
• spending potential
• automated A/B/ testing
• smart send time
• personalized product recommendations.

2. Custom Reports: 

• Access real-time performance data from the same platform you use to send messages. Use this data to spot areas for improvement.
• Gain marketing strategy insights with an in-depth analysis of historical business performance. Get access to all of your historical data, to help zero in on specific marketing channels and products.
• See a complete and accurate picture of the revenue made by each of your marketing campaigns.

3. Benchmarking with your Peers:

Comparing data with your competitors to pinpoint areas where you excel and opportunities for growth. Those could be in areas like business performance, email, SMS, or flows.

4. Advanced A/B Testing:

Even though AB testing has always been around, advanced AB testing allows AI to automatically send the winning versions to a control group.  Testing subject lines, content, design, tone, message, and send times by choosing the size of the sample of testing helps you understand what is more appealing to your customers and what to improve for future sends.

5. Acquisition Channels Value:

In order to optimize acquisition marketing, you need to know which channels are bringing the most spending customers over their lifetime. Knowing this helps you focus your efforts on the most profitable segments.

6. Identify Early VIPs:

Thanks to the predictive customer lifetime value analytics, you can identify, segment, and reach out to the customers with the highest value and engage them continuously.

AI can help you dramatically improve and streamline your email marketing by reducing the time you spend manually analyzing big data in real-time. This streamlined process helps mean that upgrading your strategy to incorporate AI is sure to be a worthwhile investment for many years to come. If you are unsure about how to start implementing artificial intelligence into your strategy, book a call with us and let us help you get there.

Initial audit & market research

You can tell right off the bat if an email marketing agency will create a successful personalized strategy for your store or not. If the agency audits your current strategy, makes sense of your metrics, and provides solid conclusions and suggestions, it’s a great sign. 

A great email marketing agency will use its expertise to implement best industry practices and bring perspective to your strategy. This includes sending times, segment ideas, content and design trends, email frequency, engagement benchmarks, etc.

The first deliverables you should expect are the first-look report, a tentative content calendar, and copy and design guidelines.  Those should be adjusted to your brand, industry, and target audience.

Assembling the best team for you

It’s no secret that one of the reasons businesses outsource email marketing work is how hard it can be to build an in-house superstar team that can focus solely on email. Therefore, your email marketing agency should make this a breeze for you. 

One person should be in charge of making your business goals, your industry’s trends and best practices, and the agency’s talents all align to create a successful strategy. This is the role of the Account Manager. This person will bring overall email strategy knowledge and project management skills to the table. 

An Account Manager cannot (and should not) do it all. You’ll need a talented set of creatives that make the strategy come to life in the email’s copy and design. Having an experienced and specialized digital copywriter and a designer is a must. 

This is, of course, just the base of the team that should be working for your brand. In the bigger picture, your email marketing agency should also count on a Research & Development department, tech experts, account manager associates, etc. 

Last but not least. Your email marketing agency should continuously work on developing its partnership with your email marketing automation platform to guarantee you get all the possible benefits. 

Here at Hustler, we recently celebrated becoming Klaviyo Elite partners, which allows us to work closely with the Klaviyo team and be privy to all the latest developments, new features, and product rollouts.

Frequent analytics reporting & update calls

When working with an email marketing agency, you are trusting them with your brand. More often than not, as an eCommerce owner, you won’t have the time to gather email marketing data. Your email marketing agency should frequently provide concise & relevant reports on your analytics: revenue, engagement, deliverability, etc. 

This regular reporting is beneficial for your agency too. It will allow them to quickly catch any issues that need fixing or any opportunities to step up your game. 

Not all can be said in weekly short reports. Update calls are needed so you and your agency align goals and strategies. This will help develop the partnership needed to make your eCommerce business thrive. 

Quality assurance check-Ins

Your agency should have systems in place to avoid those mistakes or catch them in a timely manner. 

In email marketing, there are so many moving parts that there’s always something that can break. Therefore, the first thing your agency should have is an email marketing checklist of everything to double-check that all works as it should and that there are no errors. 

But we are all only humans. Mistakes are bound to happen. Your agency should be regularly checking on the most common issues:  imperfect integrations, low metrics, broken snippets, bugs, etc.

Constant optimization

There’s no such thing as a perfect email strategy. Your business, the industry, and the audience are in constant change. Ergo, your email marketing should too. 

Your email marketing agency should push you and themselves to optimize your strategy, copy, and design constantly. 

Your email marketing agency should be doing A/B tests, trying new content ideas, optimizing send times and segments, analyzing your return on investment, creating action plans to improve specific engagement metrics, optimizing your flows, etc. 

If your email marketing agency is not doing these five things: audit & market research, assembling the best team for you, regular analytics reporting & update calls, quality assurance check-ins, and constant optimization, maybe you need to try something new. 

Book a free call with us today to know how we ensure we do all these 5 things and then some to help grow your business with retention marketing.

1. What are bounces?

A bounce is a term we use in email marketing to describe an email that was not delivered or that was rejected by the recipient’s inbox service provider. 

We can identify two different types of bounces: soft and hard bounces. 

• Soft bounces are caused by a temporary reason. That means, your email could bounce from your subscriber inbox today, but they could receive future campaigns once the issue is done. Some of the reasons for soft bounces are:
  • There’s a problem with the email server or it’s in maintenance 
  • Your recipient’s inbox is full, so there’s no space for your email
  • Your subscriber has enabled the vacation or auto-reply setting in their emails. 
• Hard bounces occur when an email cannot be delivered due a permanent cause. That means, if your email bounced once for your subscriber for one of the following reasons, you won’t be able to reach them (ever):
  • Misspelled or unexistent email addresses
  • Being blocked by the recipient

2. Why bounces are relevant?

It is essential to constantly monitor your bounces. Whether high or low, your bounce rate will impact one way or your deliverability and sender reputation. If you have too many bounces, your sender’s reputation will be negatively affected and inbox service providers will stop sending your emails to the main inbox of your subscribers, and will start sending them to their spam folder instead. 

There is no way you can change the bounces you already received, but you can take positive measures in order to prevent your bounce rate to continue growing and starting to become a problem. But, where do we draw the line? 

According to a Hubspot study, the average hard bounce rate across each industry is 0.63%. However, if you want to have a scale to measure how healthy your bounce rate actually is, here at Hustler Marketing we use Klaviyo Benchmarks as our most treasured table of reference. As you can see, your bounce rate is the healthiest when it’s less than 0.4%. 

3. How to monitor bounce rates?

First of all, monitoring is everything. Make sure you are frequently checking your bounces and bounce rates. There are a few ways you can do so in Klaviyo.

3.a. Suppressed profiles tab

Go to your profiles tab and click on Suppressed Profiles.

There you can choose to show the profiles that have been suppressed for specific reasons, including bounces. This will allow you to see all the profiles that have been suppressed by Klaviyo because of a hard bounce or 7 consecutive soft bounces. You can see their names, emails, and the date they bounced. 

3.b. Bounce segments

You can create segments to identify soft and hard bounces in a specific timeframe by using the following definitions. 

3.c. Analytics Tab

If you want to see historical data of your bounce rate to identify spikes on that specific metric, you can do so through the analytics tab. 

Just click on Dashboard, and then click on “Analytics”. You can create a new card to see both soft and hard-bounced emails or your bounce rate in general.

3.d. Campaign Analytics and Subscribers’ Profiles

After you send a new email, you can also click on your campaign’s analytics. You’ll find a report similar to this one, where you can see your bounce rate and even view the profiles that bounced. 

Once you click on View Bounces, you’ll get a list of all the people that bounced. You can click in each email to open your subscribers’ profiles. Once you are on the profile page, configure the page to see all activity related to bounces.

In this case, you can see this subscriber has bounced two times. These are soft bounces. If the subscriber would have bounced once, they wouldn’t have received a second email. 

It’s a good idea to do this process regularly, after some time you’ll begin to see a trend in the average number of soft bounces before people start receiving emails again. This will give you a good idea of how to optimize your deliverability strategy by creating “Frequently Bounced” segments and excluding them from your campaigns. 

4. How to tackle soft and hard bounces?

Most email marketing automation platforms handle some way soft and hard bounces. If you are using Klaviyo, you should know that the platform will immediately suppress from your list profile who have hard-bounced once. That means you won’t be able to send emails to those profiles anymore. However, if your subscriber has soft bounced you will still be able to email them. Unless they have soft-bounced seven consecutive times. In that case, Klaviyo will also suppress them from your email list. 

If your bounce rate is proficient, then letting Klaviyo handle the situation works fine. But, if you’re seeing a spike in bounce rates, then you can (and should) start thinking about taking on the load yourself to make sure it doesn’t become a problem. Here are some things you can do to tackle soft and hard bounces. 

4.1. Make sure you are collecting subscribers compliantly 

Buying email lists from third parties is not a good idea. When you are not the one collecting your subscribers directly, you take the risk of acquiring a bunch of profiles that may as well never heard of you and therefore have no interest in doing so now or that don’t actually exist. When you send them an email, your spam, unsubscribe and bounce rates will certainly be higher than expected. 

When building up your list, make sure you are doing so in a compliant way. You can use pop-ups, landing pages, or flyouts to get new subscribers. Just make sure people know what they are signing up for.

4.2. Clean your email list

It is important you make sure the people you are emailing are people that can provide value to your brand, but also people you can provide value to. Therefore, you should implement list hygiene processes that allow you to suppress from your list people that:

• Signed up with a secondary address just to get your pop-up incentive and then faded away and stopped interacting with your emails altogether. Create a segment with people that have received a considerable amount of emails or that have been subscribed for a considerable amount of time and that have opened an email just once. 
• Have opened your emails zero times and have placed zero orders overall time. Make sure these are profiles that have been receiving emails on a regular basis. If they have just recently subscribed, then of course they may haven’t opened an email or placed an order yet.
• Have marked your emails as spam. If they did that once, they may do it again. So it’s better to stay on the safe side. 

If you want more list hygiene tips, check this article on how a clean sending list can make all the difference for your email marketing strategy.

4.3.Remove soft bounces on a regular basis

You can also create a “Frequent Soft Bounces” segment in order to identify profiles that have bounced multiple times, but less than 7 (which is the number of soft bounces Klaviyo uses as a limit to keep people on your list). Depending on your email sending behavior, 7 soft bounces may not be the ideal limit. When creating this new segment, and deleting it recurringly from your list, you make sure your list is up to date as possible and your bounce rates remain low. 

To create the segment you just need to use the following definition:

Once the segment is ready, go to Account Settings → Profile Maintenance and choose the segment you just created to remove all its profiles from your email marketing list. 

Have trouble with bounce rates and email deliverability? 

Let our experienced marketers take a look.

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According to the 2021 State of Email Litmus Report, 83% of customers are willing to share their data to create a more personalized experience. So do not despair, and let’s go through all the different data types there are that can help you power up your email marketing strategy.

As marketers or eCommerce store owners, we need to manage customer data as what it is, an asset. And we should use it to avoid guessing what the audience wants, needs and desires. We should use the data to build a data-driven email marketing strategy and to build a strong relationship with our customers and leads. 

There are four different types of data based on the sources they come from:

1. zero-party data, 
2. first-party data, 
3. second-party data, and
4. third-party data. 

The higher the data type, the closer you are to your audience insights but the less the reach. The lower the data type, the higher the reach, but the less specific the insights. Let’s go through each data type.

Zero-Party Data

This is information that your customers or leads have given you directly. For example:

• Email preferences
• Topic interests
• Product interests
• Account configurations

The first step to gathering these types of data is through an “email preferences” form your subscribers can fill out after subscribing to your list. This will not only help you collect data about your audience but will allow you to make more informed and smarter decisions in terms of email frequency and segmentation, delivering an excellent subscriber experience. 

You can also get more information through in-email surveys. Email marketing platforms like Klaviyo allow you to add personalized profile property tags to each of your subscribers’ profiles whenever they click on certain buttons with personalized syntax. Use this feature to leverage surveys and collect information through gamified emails. 

First-Party Data

First-party data is the information that is directly collected from your audience on your own marketing channels with consent (which means is accurate and reliable). 

This is the data your email marketing platform gathers to help you create targeted segments that allow you to set up a personalized and data-driven email marketing strategy. First-party data includes: 

• Email engagement (opens, clicks, subscriptions, etc.)
• Website activity (products viewed, checkouts started, products added to cart, etc.)
• Purchase history
• Customer email
• Contact information
• Behaviors

To learn how to create targeted segments that power up your email strategy, check our email marketing segmentation guide: Basic and Advanced Klaviyo Segments Ideas and Examples.

Second-Party Data

This is the data you can acquire through a trusted partner. Ideally, this data would have been collected with consent, thus making it high in accuracy and reliability. Second-party data includes:

• Website activity 
• Social media profiles 
• Customer feedback, surveys and reviews
• Loyalty programs 

Loyalty programs are a great way to gather different types of information like reviews, social interactions, etc. 

Third-Party Data

Third-party data is information collected from one or more indirect sources. Since the source of the data varies, it’s hard to know if it was collected with consent. You can get access to this data through various third-party providers like Google, Oracle, Adobe, OnAudience, etc.

This type of data can include: 

• Browsing activity (via cookies)
• Demographics (income, age, education, gender, etc.)
• Survey responses

Third-party data can be really helpful to reach a broad audience for your advertising. And can become a starting point in finding out who your audience is and how you can communicate with them. However, you should not depend one-hundred percent on it. Keep in mind that using third-party data will become more difficult because of recent and future changes in data privacy policies on the internet. Apple is already giving users the chance to opt out of tracking on its devices, and Google will block third-party cookies from the Chrome Browser in 2023. So now it’s the time to experiment with higher data types.

Building a first-party/zero-party data plan

When starting your data plan, start by answering these questions:

• What data have you collected already? Where is it? Is it organized?
• What other data do you need to collect in order to fulfill your business email marketing goals?
• Where and how can you collect that data? 
• How will you organize it and where? 
• How are you going to use it once you got it? To create targeted segments? To personalize even more your email flows and campaigns?

We know email personalization drives results, and in order to make it happen, you need all the data you can get. But make no mistake, unprocessed data is not an asset, you need to process it, organize it, and be clear on how you are going to use it. 

If you need the help of experienced email marketers, book a free call with us and see how data can drive your email marketing strategy and, therefore, boost your sales.

How to calculate your email conversion rate

To calculate your email conversion rate, you simply need to divide the number of conversions by the number of successful email deliveries and then multiply the result by 100.

However, simply calculating the number will be not enough to understand if you are doing well or not, because you must have some kind of a benchmark to know what is considered a high or insufficient email conversion rate as part of your important email marketing metrics.

So what is a good email conversion rate?

This is a great question that unfortunately has no exact answer. It is very personal and different for each individual situation based on the market, industry, store size, email list quality, email content, your main goal (what do you consider as a conversion), etc.. So the best answer would be that a good email conversion rate is something better than what you have today.
Luckily, there are analyses that can give us a look into the broader view and understand the general ECR situation in the market.
In 2020, Klaviyo gathered data from 50.000 companies and made some great findings.
Analyzing data from campaigns they have found out that depending on the industry ECR is between 0.07% and 0.28%:

Meanwhile flows had noticeably higher conversion rates which are not surprising as flows are normally more targeted and aimed at already engaged customers. ECR here varied between 0.96% and 2.13% depending on the market.

As you can see the differences between the results are quite significant. This just proves one more time that email conversion rate is a very individual metric. You should take into account the benchmarks of your competitors that are in the same industry but in the end, your focus should always be on how to improve the email conversion rate you have right now.

Also, remember that usually actions that are considered as conversions (placed orders, filled forms, etc.) can not be done directly in the email. Email can only advertise and encourage your customers to take the action but the final step has to be made on your website or landing page. So when you are evaluating the performance of your emails pay high attention to such metrics as open rate, click rate, unsubscribe rate, bounce rate, etc. And if all of these metrics are at a healthy level but your conversion rate is low, there is a high chance the problem is not in the emails but in your website or landing page.

If you are not satisfied with your current conversion rate and need help improving it, feel free to reach out and get advice.