The importance of an engagement-based strategy
As a marketer, your goal is to create content that both resonates with your audience, and convinces them to follow through on your call-to-action (CTA). In order to accomplish this, you have to be strategic about not only what your message is, but who you’re sending it to.
If you don’t know where to begin, it’s easy to fall back onto a classic strategy: the batch-and-blast. The batch-and-blast approach is when you send all of your content to your entire subscriber list.
Considering doing this for your business? In the video below, we’ll debunk why you should think again.
Implement the nesting doll strategy
You’ve now learned why a batch-and-blast strategy won’t give you the return you’re looking for, and you understand the importance of segmentation. However, you may now be wondering:
- What is the broadest group of engaged subscribers you can send to frequently, without deliverability issues? And how can you figure this out?
Enter, the nesting doll strategy. The nesting doll strategy allows you to test engagement segments against each other by including intentionally overlapping segments in the same large campaign send. Think of these overlapping segments as a set of nesting dolls.
When you include all of these segments in the same campaign send, you can get a clear breakdown of segment performance in Klaviyo. With this information, you identify the largest audience you should send to without harming deliverability, enabling you to send messages more strategically and increase ROI.
Let’s walk through how to execute a nesting doll strategy in 4 easy steps.
Identify your engagement audiences
Decide which segments you’re going to test against each other. You may already have these built, or you may build new ones to test your hypothesis.
It’s recommended to test your main engaged segments. Try starting from a 180-day engaged segment, and test it against smaller engagement segments such as 150-day, 120-day, 90-day, 60-day, and 30-day.
Test segments using large campaign sends
Over a few weeks, select some large campaign sends you can use to test these segments against each other. You should choose messages that are applicable to broad audiences, such as large sales or company announcements. You want to run this test for more than just 1 campaign to eliminate the possibility that the individual campaign influenced the results.
Input all of your engagement segments in the audience field when setting up your campaigns. And don’t worry: even though your segments have overlapping subscribers, people won’t receive duplicated messages.
Make sure to also tag each of your campaigns with something you’ll recognize, such as “Nesting doll test”. This will be helpful when it comes to measuring performance.
Measure your results
When analyzing your campaign results, and specifically your segment performance, you should identify where your performance drop-off occurs; in other words, which segment provides the maximum efficiency before you start sending to more people with the same, or worse, results.
You should look in two places in Klaviyo:
- Audience breakdown tab
Click into your individual campaign, and navigate to the Audience breakdown tab. You’ll then see performance broken down by segment; you can see data such as total recipients, bounces, opens, clicks, conversions, and revenue.
- Custom report for campaign performance
Head to Analytics > Custom reports, and create a new campaign performance report. You’ll want to group your data by both Campaign and List / Segment, and make sure you add the appropriate tag for your nesting doll campaigns. This will allow you to see the segment performance breakdown between each of your nesting doll campaigns, so you can truly see trends across all of your tests.
Get more granular
Once the data shows your optimal sending segment, how can you get more granular and more efficient?
Identify segments within your optimal audience to do further testing.
For example, common sub-segments you can test within your optimal engagement segment may be purchasers vs. non-purchasers, so you can see if the majority of your campaign revenue is from new or recurring customers.
See an example in action
Beantown Coffee is a fictional coffee brand looking to level-up their marketing strategy, with a specific focus on improving their segmentation.
Up until now, they’ve admittedly been using the batch-and-blast strategy. They’re deliverability is starting to suffer, and their email engagement and conversion rates are below optimal.
They recently learned how the nesting doll strategy can help them identify the broadest engagement segment they can send to regularly to see great ROI, without harming their deliverability.
Click through the dropdowns below to see how Beantown Coffee executed this strategy throughout each step of the process.
Identify your engagement audiences
Beantown created a number of recent engagement segments that are intentionally overlapping. They created:
- 180-day engaged segment
- 150-day engaged segment
- 120-day engaged segment
- 90-day engaged segment
- 60-day engaged segment
- 30-day engaged segment
They want to determine: What is the largest engagement audience I should send to maximize efficiencies?
Test segments using large campaign sends
Beantown is preparing a series of email campaigns throughout the month of December, including:
- New seasonal flavor announcements
- Holiday sale drops
- An exciting company announcement from the CEO
Since these are all large-scale sends over a few weeks, Beantown selects these as great opportunities for testing their engagement segments. They make sure to add each segment into the Audience field when setting up their campaign. They additionally ensure they add a tag for Nesting doll campaign for tracking and reporting purposes.
Measure results
Beantown first clicks into each of their campaigns and heads to the Audience breakdown tab. Once in this tab, they can easily see how each of their segments contributed to the performance of the campaign.
To get a holistic view of how these individual segments performed across all of their testing campaigns, they created a custom report for email campaign performance specifically for the campaigns tagged as Nesting doll campaigns.
They discover that performance remains stagnant and drops off once they pass the 120-day bucket. This means that their 120-day engaged segment is the broadest audience they can send to on a regular basis without risking their deliverability.
Get more granular
Now that Beantown has determined their broadest engagement segment, they want to continue running more performance tests within it.
They decide to next compare purchasers vs. non-purchasers within this 120-day engagement segment, to help them hone in on whether new or returning customers are driving the most engagement and revenue.
With this information, they can continue tweaking and iterating on their strategy to best engage their audience.