Expand Segments, Maintain Deliverability, and Reach More People the Smart Way
So you’ve decided to walk the path of light: no blasting your entire list, but instead preserving your deliverability. Even improving it—or at least saving it.
You’ve already segmented engaged customers. It’s much smaller than your full list, but it guarantees good open rates (above 18%), it’s a safe bet, and spam filters are starting to like you.
Money is rolling in steadily, but there’s still a concern… have you left money on the table? Should you ignore all the other customers left behind?
No, you don’t have to. No customer needs to be left behind.
Sure, some of them might be gone forever, but not all hope is lost. You can still expand your main segment and “rescue” some of them. Out of the darkness and into the light, where they can receive your offers and discounts once again.
Treat your main segment as a living, breathing entity—one that expands and contracts like a pufferfish. Open rates higher than 18% give you some leeway to “inhale” by including more subscribers. You might select people who engaged over a longer duration, like 100 days instead of 75 or 300 days instead of 250.
Some of these recipients will respond favorably, increasing your total engaged. Of course, expanding the list to include less engaged recipients may lower your open rates. To restore them, you’ll need to reduce your send—“exhaling,” if you will.
Slowly, your engaged list will increase, but not without ups and downs. Instead of a smooth, linear progression, it’s more organic—email marketing’s cycle of life.
📊 The Advanced Reports Are Your Stethoscope
How do you know who to “exhale” and who to “inhale”? Advanced Reports and analytics will give you a good sense of how your list is performing. Maybe you expanded too much and need to pull back, or maybe you can push it further.
Symptoms of a list problem include lower open rates, higher spam complaints, unsubscribe rates, reduced clicks, revenue drops, and performance issues across specific email domains. Sometimes, not all inbox providers show low open rates. It might just be one or two. For example, Yahoo might deliver your emails to the inbox, while Hotmail flags them as spam. You can adjust your send strategy for specific domains to improve performance without affecting your entire list.
📉 Okay, Open Rates Went Down. Time to Back Off?
Probably yes, but first, check the Advanced Reports. You can tweak email domains via segmentation to reduce sends only where necessary, keeping your list as large as possible.
In the example below, Gmail’s open rate began lagging behind while others remained high.
Image 1, Pre-Calibration:
Instead of downsizing the entire list, we created a segment (Image 2) and excluded it from upcoming campaigns. This allowed us to maintain the same segment size while reducing sends only to Gmail. We excluded anyone with “@gmail” who hadn’t opened in the last 60 days.
Image 2, Gmail Excluding Segment:
The result was immediate. Gmail open rates rose to 33.1%, and the email was delivered to more people despite being sent to fewer Gmail subscribers (Image 3).
Image 3, Post-Calibration:
Segmentation is one of Klaviyo’s most powerful features, and Advanced Reports help you leverage it effectively. To get started, review reports from your last few campaigns to find patterns. Formulate theories about your list’s behavior, create segments to test those theories, and analyze the results. Over time, using Advanced Reports to set up exclusions will become second nature, and your list will grow organically—like any living organism.
If you have questions or interesting segmentation examples, comment below. We’d love to hear from you!
Until next time,
Sócrates Lozano and Thomas McClintock
Hustler Marketing
