Holy crap - I see this in just about every account I audit. E-commerce business owners are always so proud of how large their list size 😏 but it’s not the size of the wave there buddy boy, we need results…

If you find yourself sending to “website subscribers - all” or whatever it is that you’re calling your list these days, can you do me a favor?

STOP

It’s okay that people don’t open your emails. In fact, I think it’s better to exclude unengaged subscribers than it is to send to people that don’t open.

Segmentation isn’t about better targeting. It’s about respecting intent.

If you don’t know how to segment your lists, watch this video. It breaks it all down for you like that cool uncle at the wedding.

Think about it - inboxes get blown up with marketing emails. Yours has to stand out in a sea of other subject lines. If you find your open rates hurting, try running some A/B tests with different variations.

Personalization in subject lines help, but they aren’t going to be a magical remedy. Subject lines don’t exist to trick someone into opening. They confirm that opening is worth the interruption.

Overusing emojis hurts - we see this a lot and for good reason. It used to be standard practice to add an emoji or two at the beginning and at the end of a subject line. This helped it to stand out in inboxes. But then everybody else started copying each other. Now your inbox is flooded with emojis and they blend together.

Trying to be overly cute hurts you. Don’t overdo it with trying to cliffhanger people into opening. If your email has an offer in it - tell people about it. If your email is just a genuine thank you, make sure they know that. Whatever you’re trying to achieve with the email should be felt in the subject line.

Learn how to speak to your target audience. Most e-commerce businesses know how to speak about features, not benefits. This is what holds so many back. When marketing your business, stop using overly-technical jargon. Boil it down. Could a 4th grader understand your offer? Your writing? If not, you’re overdoing it.

When do you look at email? Probably first thing in the morning, sometime late morning or early afternoon and then sometime at night if I had to guess. While I may not be a real wizard, these are pretty typical behaviors.

But there’s no such thing as a blanket statement for marketing in general.

Test your send times.

Klaviyo has some great ways that you can test send times, especially if your list is over 15,000 contacts. Let’s break down Smart Send Times (different from ‘Smart Sending’ - I know, I’ve been trying to get Klaviyo to change this for a few years at this point).

We get it, you have a HUGE list - but as I stated before, it needs to be impactful, not huge. I see so many Klaviyo accounts that have largely unengaged segments in their list.

A recent account we took over came to us bragging about a 25,000 list. Naturally I was excited too - this does unlock a lot of excellent testing and experiments we can run in Klaviyo to really lock in best practices for this account.

So the first thing I did was hop in and see if they had cleaned this list anytime recently.

They hadn’t.

They took over this company from another person who built it.

Well guess what?

They bought a list.

So I warned them - this could get ugly.

And it did.

After building an unengaged profile where people who hadn’t opened a single email, clicked a single email but did indeed receive those emails over a 180 day period - the client was left with 2,500 people on their list.

Silver lining - their Klaviyo costs just got a lot cheaper!

It is better to send to a smaller engaged list than to a large unengaged list.

Open rates don’t tell you how good your email is. They tell you how healthy the relationship is.

When open rates fall, the fix usually isn’t in the campaign you’re about to send. It’s in the decisions that shaped the list long before that email ever existed.

What are some other ways that you’ve increased your open rate?