If you’re looking at your list and feeling unsure of where you stand with engagement and overall list health, this guide is for you. Deliverability is swayed by a number of factors which you can read more about here, but one major factor is whether or not you maintain solid engagement with your list. It’s important to segment as much as you can to ensure that you’re sending relevant content to your audience — more tailored content will lead to higher engagement, which will establish a good reputation with providers like Gmail and Yahoo. In this guide, we’ll walk through a couple of different segments that will give you a perspective of where you stand with your email subscribers.

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Unengaged vs Engaged Contacts

Privy offers pre-built Smart Segments in your dashboard, including the following:
  • Engaged Contacts: this segment contains any mailable contacts who have engaged with at least (1) email in the last 90 days, as well as new sign ups from the past 90 days.
  • Unengaged Contacts: this segment contains any mailable contacts who have been on your list for at least 90 days, but have not engaged with a single email in 90+ days.
If you head to Contacts > Segments, you can view these Smart Segments and the number of contacts in each one: What am I looking for? By comparing the size of these segments, you can get a pulse on what percentage of your list has engaged with you in the last 3 months. In an ideal world, more than 50% of your mailable contacts would fall into Engaged Contacts. When should I take action? If you notice that a significantly higher percentage of your list (>75%) falls into the Unengaged Contacts segment, it’s time to try sending some re-engagement emails and/or tidy your list.
Note: It’s important to consider your sending habits here. If you don’t send many emails, it’s more likely that a majority of your list will fall into Unengaged Contacts. Privy recommends sending at least 1 email campaign each month to get an accurate pulse on your list’s interest.

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Older Contacts

As your business grows over the years, it’s important to make sure you’re sending to active, interested email addresses. It’s not uncommon that some subscribers can lose interest, or potentially stop using an email address for a number of reasons. In Privy, you can segment by when a contact’s profile was created. To get a pulse on your older contacts’ engagement, we recommend building a segment that looks like the following: By using Created at is before X date + Did not open in the last X days, you’re narrowing down on older contacts who are no longer active with your emails.
If you’re newer to Privy, this data might not be available to you since your contacts were created in Privy on the day you imported your list. You can use Shopify Tags or import contacts’ historical data using a custom field.

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Inactive Contacts

Along with a contact’s age and email engagement, another valuable piece of data is whether or not they’ve shopped with you before. Existing customers who have placed at least one order with you are 9x more likely to convert again in the future. Contacts who have been on your list for a significant period of time, haven’t opened emails in 6+ months, and have never ordered with you are far less likely to engage with you. To get a pulse on how many inactive contacts you have, we recommend building a custom segment that looks something like this: Along with their Created at date + Did not open engagement data, Order count is 0 will exclude any contacts who have purchased from you before.

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What should I do with these segments?

It’s important to regularly practice good list hygiene. We recommend sending re-engagement emails to these colder segments a few times a year and cleaning any uninterested or inactive contacts.  The truth is, you’re not doing yourself any favors by holding onto and repeatedly emailing contacts who refuse to show interest in your content. When contacts are not engaging with and/or delete or archive your emails, inbox providers will recognize this as a pattern and are more likely to start filtering your emails. For this reason, it’s important to keep a pulse on your list’s engagement and act accordingly! If a contact is truly interested in re-engaging with your brand, they can easily sign back up on your site at any time.
Looking for guidance on list hygiene? Check out this resource.