Chapter 5: Master List & Essential Segments

Now that you’re gathering signups and ready to start sending regular campaigns with them, you can build some basic segments that will help you measure and understand the health of your marketing database.

This takes just a few minutes and gives you tremendous insight into who is buying, how many engaged leads you have vs engaged customers, and how many unengaged subscribers you have that you can reactivate.

We started to set some of these segments up in previous chapters, so you may recognize some of these. The first and most critical step to this is making sure that all of your marketing opt-ins are coming into one list. This makes segmentation and measurement much easier when using Klaviyo’s built-in analysis tools.

Why a master list?

By collecting all of your subscribers in one list and then segmenting, you keep it very easy to make sure that you’re always measuring and looking at all of your subscribers, and not accidentally including or excluding any opt-ins. All of your segments can be built with a single “is a member of a list” clause in the segmentation logic, which is also fast and easy to select, rather than needing to manage multiple ANDs and ORs just to get the right members into the list.

This also makes it very easy to use the built-in Klaviyo analysis tool like engagement reports and lead growth reports to understand where subscribers are coming from, and who’s leaving.

For example, this report shows you where these signups are coming from, and which pages they’re leaving through, and the overall growth of your marketing database over time.

Related reading: How To Organize All Your Klaviyo Lists Into Just One

What should your foundational segments look like?

There are six foundational segments that I recommend all brands set up, even if they don’t use deeper segmentation on a regular basis. Klaviyo segments are awesome for how they’re always up to date and come with useful reporting.

If you do no other segmentation, these three segments are very useful for your campaign sending.

1. Engaged Segment – 120D open or click

This segment is great for your everyday sending of campaign emails. It contains everyone that’s engaged at all with your email marketing in the last 4 months, or who joined your email list in the last 30 days and so may not have activity yet.

2. Engaged Leads – 120D open or click

Great for everyday sending to people who are engaged with your marketing, but have never purchased directly from you. This can be good for offering discounts, promotions, or other incentives you don’t want your existing customers to see. You can also try tactics that might help get people over the line for the first time, like reviews and education content.

3. Engaged Customers – 120D open or click

This is the same but made up with just your existing customers, and great for promoting upsells, cross-sells, new product launches, and so on.

Other useful Segments

4. High Intent Shoppers – 45D open or click or viewed product

This is a high-activity audience that is great treat for burst campaigns. I know we all get in that mood of, “I really want to make a little more money this month.. what can I try?” An extra email campaign to people who are engaged with email and actively shopping can be a good way to try and pull in a few more sales, whether it’s just with a reminder, some kind of incentive, or a specific product campaign to encourage sell-through. A high engagement audience like this is likely to produce strong sales, without tiring out your main list with extra email.

5. VIPs – Typically 4+ Placed Orders or 4x AOV

Next up is your VIP segment. Typically this is made up of people with at least 4 placed orders, or who have spent at least 4X your typical AOV, but you can tune this to fit your business. I did a big survey of Klaviyo customers and over 300 VIP segments in 2018 and nearly all of them were structured like this. I did find a few that were based on other data, like from loyalty programs, but the vast majority were just based on orders or AOV. A segment like this is great for early launches, running surveys, getting feedback on things, or website targeting with specialized forms or offers… these are your absolute best customers.

6. Unengaged – No open or click 120D or 150D

Your unengaged list isn’t suitable for emailing anymore. But there’s still a lot of value in there – it’s full of lapsed customers and others who were interested in your brand but dropped off. As a result, this audience is great for Facebook ads + other custom audiences. You can typically engage them at a much lower cost, as custom audiences are relatively inexpensive and have higher engagement rates, as they’re familiar with your brand already. If someone hasn’t engaged with email in five months, reaching them with low-cost ads on another platform may be an inexpensive way to reactivate them. If they do come back and engage with your email again afterwards (resubscribing, abandoning a cart, etc.) they’ll come out of this segment and go back to your main engaged ones automatically.

You can read more about this here: What should I do with my inactive subscribers?