Maintain and improve email deliverability with segmentation best practices

As a best practice for deliverability, Attentive recommends segmenting email subscribers by recent engagement. Engagement refers to how subscribers interact with your emails, for example by opening them or by clicking a link in an email. Segmentation involves dividing your subscriber list based on specific criteria, such as recent engagement. By segmenting based on engagement, you can maintain (or even improve) your brand’s email deliverability and ultimately boost revenue.

Follow the steps in the sections below to decide how you want to segment, build segments, choose a sending strategy, and review engagement and deliverability.

1. Decide how to segment by engagement

First, choose the right segmentation strategy based on your brand’s needs:

• Simple: Create a segment of subscribers who’ve engaged with your emails at least once at any time in the past. We only recommend simple segmentation for brands with small subscriber lists (a few hundred to a few thousand subscribers).
  
  This approach requires less effort while still enabling you to send messages only to subscribers who’ve engaged with your emails.
• Tiered: Create segments of subscribers who’ve engaged with your emails at least once in the last 7, 14, 30, 60, 90, and 180 days and those who haven’t engaged at least once in more than 180 days. Tiered segmentation is best for brands with a few thousand subscribers or more.
  
  This approach enables you to send to your most engaged subscribers first in order to improve deliverability for subsequent segments, but it requires more effort to build and incorporate into your campaign sending strategy.

If you’re using a tiered engagement segmentation strategy, we also recommend that you set up sunset segments and journeys to identify and re-engage subscribers who haven’t opened or clicked links in email messages from you.

2. Build segments by engagement in Attentive

Follow the steps in the sections below to build simple or tiered engagement segments in Attentive.

Build a simple engagement segment

Follow these steps to build a simple engagement segment:

1. Go to Segments and click + Create segment.
   A pop-up window appears.
2. Next to Dynamic segment, click Create.
   The Create a segment page opens.
3. From the Choose condition dropdown, select A subscriber’s activity.
4. From the Choose activity dropdown, select Opened an email.
5. Configure the condition as follows: Has Opened an email from Attentive At least once Over all time.
   
6. (Optional) If you also send emails from Klaviyo, click +. Configure the next condition as follows: Has Opened an email from Klaviyo At least once Over all time. Choose Any from the dropdown at the top of the page, then click Save.
   
7. Click Create.
   The Save your segment pop-up appears.
8. Enter a Name for your segment (e.g., Engaged email subscribers) and an optional Description.
9. Repeat steps 1–8, but in step 5, configure the condition as follows: Has not Opened an email from Attentive At least once Over all time. Also make sure to give your segment an appropriate name for step 8, such as Unengaged email subscribers.

Build a tiered engagement segment

Follow these steps to build tiered engagement segments:

1. Go to Segments and click + Create segment.
   A pop-up window appears.
2. Next to Dynamic segment, click Create.
   The Create a segment page opens.
3. From the Choose condition dropdown, select A subscriber’s activity.
4. From the Choose activity dropdown, select Opened an email.
5. Configure the first condition as follows: Has Opened an email from Attentive At least once In the last 7 day(s).
6. (Optional) If you also send emails from Klaviyo, click +. Configure the next condition as follows: Has Opened an email from Klaviyo At least once In the last 7 day(s). Choose Any from the dropdown at the top of the page. 
   
7. Click Create.
   The Save your segment pop-up appears.
8. Enter a Name for your segment and an optional Description.
   
   
   Note: We recommend the following naming convention: Opened email in last 7 days. If you also send emails from Klaviyo, we recommend: Opened email in last 7 days (Attentive or Klaviyo).
9. Click Save.
10. Repeat steps 1–8 for each of your engagement tiers. We recommend configuring the conditions as follows:
    • Has Opened an email from Attentive At least once Between the last 8 and 14 day(s)
    • Has Opened an email from Attentive At least once Between the last 15 and 30 day(s)
    • Has Opened an email from Attentive At least once Between the last 31 and 60 day(s)
    • Has Opened an email from Attentive At least once Between the last 61 and 90 day(s)
    • Has Opened an email from Attentive At least once Between the last 91 and 180 day(s)
    • Has not Opened an email from Attentive At least once In the last 180 day(s)
    • If you also send emails from Klaviyo, we recommend building additional conditions for each segment as in step 6.
    • We recommend following a similar naming convention as in the note from step 8 for each segment, such as Opened email btw last 8 and 14 days (Attentive or Klaviyo).

3. Choose a campaign sending strategy

Your sending strategy for campaigns, particularly for email campaigns, depends on your engagement strategy.

Send to simple engagement segments

If you’re using the simple engagement strategy, your sending strategy should be similarly straightforward. Only send emails to subscribers in your engaged segment, and exclude subscribers from your unengaged segment.

Send to tiered engagement segments

If you choose the tiered engagement segmentation strategy, we recommend creating separate campaigns to send emails to engagement segments in descending order, from most engaged to least engaged.

It’s also helpful to wait before sending to the next segment. Waiting for a period, like 60 minutes, between sending to different engagement segments helps improve email deliverability. The pause allows you to monitor engagement with your most active subscribers first, which can help you make adjustments for subsequent campaigns.

4. Review engagement and deliverability

As you send email campaigns, monitor the Campaigns page and the pages for individual campaign performance. These pages display metrics and information about your campaigns, including open rate, click rate, unique opens, unique clicks, conversions, revenue, and unsubscribes. You can filter this information by channel or select a specific email to view its performance metrics. See View and manage email campaigns for more information.

You can also refer to the Campaign Performance report, which you can customize in a number of ways.

As always, please reach out to your Attentive CSM and Email Product Specialist, or contact our White Glove team (whiteglove@attentive.com) if you’re looking for more detailed reporting or have any questions.