You will learn
Learn how to use engagement reports for lists and segments to make it easy to understand the quality of your lists and segments, break down how engaged a given group is, and facilitate list cleaning.
When it comes to making money from email marketing, many believe that more profiles equal more revenue. However, most of the time, this is not the case. 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 will hurt your deliverability and sender reputation, as well as irritate subscribers. Sending to engaged profiles will boost open rates, click rates, and revenue per email.
Accessing an engagement report for a list or segment
To find the engagement report for a particular list or segment:
- Navigate to Audiences > Lists & Segments.
- Choose the list or segment you want to view the report for.
- If you've chosen a list, click the Reports dropdown and select Engagement Report.
- If you've chosen a segment, click Engagement Report next to the Edit Definition tab.
When you use this feature for the first time, you will be prompted to generate the report. These reports are based on average open rates and how long a profile has been in your account. The time your report takes to generate will depend on the size of your list or segment. Once generated, your report will look similar to the following example.
What's included in engagement reports
Engagement reports are broken down into 4 key areas:
- How Engaged are These Members?
- 30 Day Overall Open Rate, Click Rate, and Average Order Value
- Engagement Over Time by Age of Profile
- Open Rate by Age of Profile
For these reports, Open Rate is defined as the total number of opens divided by total emails delivered. This is different from how Klaviyo calculates open rates for a per campaign basis, which is unique opens divided by total deliveries.
Age of Profile is how long an email address has been in your Klaviyo account, not how long an email address has been in a list or segment. Say you have a user that was added to your account 5 weeks ago but wasn't added to a segment until 1 week ago -- they will be in the "5 weeks" bucket.
How engaged are these members?
This chart shows engagement over the past 30 days. You can see what percentage of your subscribers in a list or segment engage with your emails.
You will see profiles organized into 5 buckets:
- Very engaged
Recipients who have a 50%+ open rate in the past 30 days. - Somewhat engaged
Recipients who have a 20-50% open rate in the past 30 days. - Barely engaged
Recipients who have an open rate that is greater than 0%, but less than 20% in the past 30 days. - Not engaged
Recipients who haven't opened any emails in the past 30 days. - Received no emails
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.
Generally speaking, more than half of your list should fall into the engaged or somewhat engaged category. No more than a quarter of your list should fall into the not engaged section.
Past 30 day averages
This area allows you to view performance averages over the past 30 days at a glance.
Here's how these values are calculated:
- Average open rate
Total opens divided by total deliveries. - Average click rate
Total clicks divided by total deliveries. - Average order value
Total placed order value divided by total placed order events.
A healthy aggregate open rate for any given list or segment is 30% or higher.
With the release of iOS15, macOS Monterey, iPadOS 15, and WatchOS 8, Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) changed the way that we receive open rate data on your emails by prefetching our tracking pixel. With this change, it’s important to understand that open rates will be inflated.
To see if your opens are affected, we suggest creating a custom report that includes an MPP property. You can also identify these opens in your individual subscriber segments.
For complete information on MPP opens, visit our iOS 15: How to Prepare for Apple’s Changes guide.
Engagement over time by age of profile
This graph shows the distribution of engaged profiles by age or how long they have been in your Klaviyo account.
Profiles are grouped by their weekly age, up to 52 weeks (1 year). This means that profiles grouped in the 8 weeks bucket were added to your account 8 weeks ago.
Each column shows the distribution of all profiles of that age in three 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 or equal to 20%. - Unengaged
Total opens divided by total deliveries is less than 20%. - 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 use this graph to see engagement across different cohorts of profiles. This will help you identify whether there’s a specific point in time when people start to disengage from your brand. If there is, you can use that information for your winback efforts. For example, you can 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. Many marketers don't realize that sending to outdated email addresses can bring down open rates. This graph allows you to see the status of your lists and segments.
Profiles are grouped by their age on the horizontal axis and the overall open rate for that group is plotted above. Open rates are calculated as such:
- Total opens over all time for all profiles of that age divided by total deliveries over all time for all profiles of that age
You can drill down further by clicking on the number of engaged or unengaged members. The charts will also show the number of engaged and unengaged profiles per group.
If you look at where there is the highest volume of unengaged subscribers, you can use this chart to figure out if you should use the age of a subscriber as criteria for segmenting and cleaning your list.
For example, if you have many unengaged profiles who were added over 36 weeks ago, you might want to separate them into their own segment and email them less frequently.
Interpreting your results
Engagement is the cornerstone of successful email marketing. One key factor that influences engagement is the age of an email address, which is why we've built this view into the reports. 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. You should completely remove subscribers who have never opened an email. If you have unengaged subscribers scattered across the board, reassess the relevance of the content you send. If you're sending the same types of emails day after day, you may be boring your subscribers.
You may also want to consider segmenting out barely engaged profiles and treating them differently. For example, funnel them into a re-engagement flow. For more information on applying these reports to assess and restrategize segments, check out our article on how to Use Segment Engagement Reports to Judge Lead Quality.