Understanding engagement reports for lists and segments

You will learn

Learn how to analyze engagement reports for email lists and segments to understand how engaged your subscribers are. Engagement reporting can also help determine if you need to take additional steps, like list cleaning, to address engagement issues.

Before you begin

You will first need to access or generate your engagement report for a list or segment. Head to our guide on how to create an engagement report for a list or segment to learn how to set up your report.

The report includes profiles with an email address who belong to the list or segment when the report runs. Profiles without an email address are excluded.

Check Last Updated On before interpreting the results. Engagement reports do not update automatically. To update an existing report, click the refresh icon (Refresh Data). You can refresh once every 24 hours, and the updated results appear when processing finishes.

The importance of engaged lists and segments

When it comes to generating revenue from email marketing, more profiles does not necessarily equal more revenue. It doesn't matter how many profiles you send to if your recipients are unengaged.

In fact, sending regularly to a group of unengaged profiles can hurt your deliverability and sender reputation, as well as irritate subscribers. Sending to engaged profiles can improve open rates, click rates, and revenue per recipient.

Engagement report data and setup

Domain view

Use the Domains dropdown to review your data for all email domains or one of the available domain groups. Select Other to view email addresses that do not match the named domain options.

Knowing which domains are engaging, or conversely not engaging, with your emails can help to diagnose potential deliverability issues to certain inboxes. From this data, you can then see where you need to segment out problem domains, strengthen your reputation, and then eventually increase engagement once again.

Charts in the report

Engagement reports are broken down into 5 key areas:

1. Past 30 day averages
2. Engagement over the last 30 days
3. Engagement distribution over time
4. Open rate by age of profile
5. Number of engaged members by age of profile

The charts grouped by age show the first 52 weekly age buckets. Profiles aged 52 weeks or more are not displayed in these charts.

Understanding key data points and differences

For these reports, Open Rate is defined as the total number of opens divided by total emails delivered. This differs from how Klaviyo calculates open rates on a per-campaign basis, which is unique opens divided by the total deliveries of that specific campaign. Because repeat opens count in engagement reports, the open rate can exceed 100%.

Age of Profile shows how long an email address has been in your Klaviyo account (i.e., not how long an email address has been in a list or segment). For example, if a profile was added to your account 10 weeks ago but wasn’t added to a segment until 1 week ago, it is grouped by its age in your account.

Past 30 day averages

At the top of your report is an area to view performance averages over the past 30 days at a glance.

Here's how these values are calculated:

• Open rate
  Total opens divided by total deliveries.
• Click rate
  Total clicks divided by total deliveries.
• Average order value
  Total value divided by total events for your account’s mapped Placed Order metric. If no Placed Order metric is mapped, the report uses Active on Site instead, so this card does not represent order value.

Engagement over the last 30 days chart

The member engagement chart shows engagement over the past 30 days.

You will see profiles organized into 5 buckets:

• Very engaged (dark blue in chart)
  Recipients who have a 50%+ open rate in the past 30 days.
• Somewhat engaged (green in chart)
  Recipients who have an open rate greater than 20% but less than 50% in the past 30 days.
• Barely engaged (yellow in chart)
  Recipients who have an open rate greater than 0% and up to 20% in the past 30 days.
• Not engaged (orange in chart)
  Recipients who received emails but have not opened any in the past 30 days.
• Received no emails (light blue in chart) Recipients who haven't received any emails in the past 30 days, likely because they're suppressed or have recently been added to the list or segment.

Hover over any part of the chart to see the total number of subscribers who fall into each category.

In general, more than half of your list should fall into the very engaged or somewhat engaged category. No more than a quarter of your list should fall into the not engaged section.

If you find that more than a quarter of your list is not engaged, consider a re-engagement campaign. For customers who have purchased before, consider a winback flow. You may also want to see if there are specific domain(s) related to this low engagement, and segment out problem domains and build back your reputation with that particular domain(s).

Engagement distribution over time

The engagement distribution chart shows the distribution of engaged profiles by age, meaning how long they have been in your Klaviyo account.

Each column shows the distribution of all profiles of that age in 3 buckets: engaged, unengaged, or never received an email. For this graph, engagement is based on all events over the lifetime of the profile. This means a 30-week-old profile will be assigned a bucket based on 30 weeks of data.

The buckets are defined as follows:

• Engaged
  Total opens divided by total deliveries is greater than 20%.
• Unengaged
  Total opens divided by total deliveries is 20% or less, among profiles who have received emails.
• Never Received Email
  This profile never received any emails, either because they are suppressed or were only recently added to the list or segment.

You can also hover over any point in the graph to see the specific week, and the breakdown of subscribers who engaged, did not engage, and those who never received the email.

Use this graph to compare engagement across cohorts of profiles of different ages. It shows each cohort’s accumulated engagement, rather than tracking the same profiles week by week. If older cohorts have lower engagement, use that information to plan your winback efforts. For example, set up a winback flow that targets customers with special offers or exclusive content.

Open rate by age of profile

The open rate by age of profile graph shows how the age of a profile correlates with open rates. This information helps determine if any older or outdated email addresses are bringing down open rates.

Profiles are grouped by age on the horizontal axis and the overall open rate for that group is plotted on the chart above.

Open rates are calculated as total opens over all time for all profiles of that age, divided by total deliveries over all time for all profiles of that age. To drill down further, hover on 1 of the plot points to see the open rate for that particular week.

If you look at where the lowest open rates are, you can use this chart to figure out if you should use the age of a subscriber as criteria to segment and clean your list. For example, if you notice older profiles have lower open rates than newer profiles, you can segment on age to target newer profiles.

Number of engaged members by age of profile

The Number of engaged members by age of profile chart shows how many profiles in each weekly age group are engaged or unengaged. Engaged profiles have an open rate above 20%. Unengaged profiles have an open rate of 20% or less. These categories use opens and deliveries over the profile’s lifetime. Profiles who have never received an email are excluded from this chart.

Hover over any bar in the chart to see the engaged vs. unengaged subscriber numbers for that particular week.

If you look at where the highest volume of unengaged profiles are, you can use this chart to figure out if you should use the age of a subscriber as criteria to segment and clean your list. For example, if you notice that the older profiles are less engaged than newer profiles, you can segment based on the age of the profile to focus in on newer subscribers.

Interpreting your results

Engagement is a critical component of successful email marketing. A key factor that influences engagement is the age of an email address. This is also why it's important to continuously grow your list; as older profiles detach from your brand, replace them with new, engaged subscribers.

If you notice a high volume of old, unengaged profiles, it's time to clean your list. Before suppressing profiles, review how many emails they have received and whether they have clicked, purchased, or otherwise engaged. Use the never engaged segment criteria to identify candidates for suppression. If you have unengaged subscribers scattered across the board, reassess the relevance of your content or ask these profiles what kind of content they want to see. You may be sending content to your subscribers that is irrelevant or repetitive.

For barely engaged profiles who have purchased before, consider a winback flow.

For more information on applying these reports to assess and restrategize segments, check out our resource on how to use segment engagement reports to judge lead quality.

Additional resources