Prioritize the profiles that engage with your brand
List cleaning refers to isolating unengaged profiles and excluding them from the majority of your email marketing communications. When you prioritize sending to your contacts who are most likely to engage with your messages, you can:
- See an increase in email engagement
Your email open and click rates will likely increase if you exclude unengaged contacts from most of your sends. This practice helps ensure your emails reach subscribers who are most likely to open, click, and engage. - Better personalize and target your messages
The more your customers interact with your messages and make purchases, the more information you have about them. Having this customer data empowers you to create more personalized messages that help retain and engage your loyal customer base. When you clean your list, you can focus on collecting more data from your customers to power your messaging strategy and drive more conversions.
- Improve your sender reputation
When you remove unengaged contacts from the majority of your email sends, you’ll likely see your unsubscribe and spam rates decrease. When you keep these numbers low, inbox providers like Google and Yahoo are more likely to allow your messages to successfully hit your recipients’ inboxes.
Watch the video below to learn more about list cleaning, how to accomplish it in Klaviyo, and how it differs from a similar process called active profile management.
If you have never cleaned your subscriber list before, you should follow the steps outlined in our guide on how to identify unengaged profiles and exclude them from the majority of your email sends.
List cleaning vs. active profile management
As outlined in the video above, list cleaning differs from another similar process called active profile management. While list cleaning refers to the exclusion of unengaged profiles from marketing communications, active profile management is the process of suppressing inactive profiles in your Klaviyo account. Here’s how to differentiate unengaged vs. inactive profiles:
- Unengaged profiles
Unengaged profiles are subscribers who haven’t recently engaged with your brand’s marketing communications. It makes sense to exclude these people from the majority of your email sends rather than suppressing them, because there are a few key times when you’d still want to message them, like during a huge holiday sale or a large business-wide announcement. - Inactive profiles
Inactive profiles are subscribers who haven’t interacted with your business as a whole in an extended period of time. This includes engaging with marketing communications, browsing your site, or making purchases. It is very unlikely that these profiles will drive any more revenue from your business, so it makes sense to suppress them.
To learn more about suppressing inactive profiles, check out our guide on active profile management.
Note: All segment criteria are ultimately up to your discretion. Our suggestions here are based on what works well for a large majority of Klaviyo users, but you are ultimately able to shrink and expand the time periods to whatever you feel makes the most sense for your audience. If you send daily emails, consider shrinking this timeframe to 90 days.