Understanding active profile management in Klaviyo

You will learn

Learn how to manage active profiles in your Klaviyo account and reduce the number of profiles counted toward your email plan by suppressing those that have not engaged with your business for a sustained period of time.

In this guide, you will find our general recommendations for identifying inactive profiles to suppress. Consider your customers’ buying cycles and opportunities to re-engage them before suppressing them.

Active profiles in Klaviyo

Any profile that can be emailed through Klaviyo is considered an active email profile. There are 2 main categories of active profiles:

• Subscribers
  Subscribers have filled out a sign-up form or otherwise explicitly consented to receive email marketing.
  
• Profiles added by general engagement
  It is possible for someone to share their email with you without explicitly consenting to ongoing email marketing. For example, someone who placed an order or abandoned a checkout on your site may have added their email address during the checkout process, but never explicitly opted in.

Ecommerce integrations (e.g., Shopify and WooCommerce) can add both types of active profiles to Klaviyo, depending on the actions a visitor takes while on your site.

Suppressed profiles in Klaviyo

When a profile becomes suppressed, they will no longer be eligible to receive any marketing emails. Klaviyo will automatically skip over suppressed profiles at send time. Additionally, suppressed profiles do not contribute towards your email plan’s active profile count.

Suppressed profiles remain in your account. If you use Advanced KDP, they still count toward its total profile count.

Once a profile is suppressed, even if that contact starts a checkout on your website or makes a purchase, they will remain suppressed and ineligible to receive any marketing emails.

A manual suppression can be removed when a profile resubscribes to email marketing or when you remove it manually. Resubscribing also records email marketing consent. These actions do not clear suppressions caused by bounces or an invalid email address.

Billing plans in Klaviyo

Klaviyo email billing is structured around the number of active profiles (or contacts) in your Klaviyo account. Every Klaviyo user must have a base plan, which is contingent on the number of active profiles you have in your account and the number of emails you send.

Your plan must allow enough profiles to accommodate the number of active profiles in your account, or you may be automatically upgraded the next billing cycle.

Email send limits depend on your plan. For example, the free plan allows 250 active profiles and 500 email sends per month. Check your plan’s email send allowance before planning your campaigns.

For instance, if your plan allows 500 profiles and 5,000 email sends, you can send up to 5,000 emails to any of these profiles. It can be an equal amount (10 to each profile) or a unique distribution in which more emails are sent to certain profiles, and only 1 to others.

After suppressing profiles, review your email plan. A lower active profile count does not necessarily lower your bill: you may need to choose a lower plan unless auto-downgrade is enabled for your account. Learn more about how Klaviyo billing works.

What is active profile management?

Active profile management is the process of suppressing inactive subscribers, or churned customers. These are profiles that have demonstrated a long, sustained period of inactivity (i.e., no website visits, purchases, or marketing engagement). Due to this sustained period of inactivity, it is highly unlikely that these profiles will engage with your brand.

If a profile is not generating any revenue for your business in Klaviyo, and you do not see any opportunity to win them back, you can take action to suppress them so they do not count towards your email plan’s active profile count.

Understanding inactivity

Even with a strong marketing strategy that nurtures your customers over the course of their lifecycle with your brand, some contacts may not engage with you for a long, sustained period of time. This means that these profiles are both no longer engaging with your regular email sends, and no longer taking any measurable actions to engage with your business well beyond their expected buying cycles.

These profiles are not responding to events like product launches, winback messages, or even big sales like Black Friday. They have never purchased, have no tracked visits to your website, no checkouts started, and have not engaged with your sends. These are truly “inactive” contacts that can be suppressed in Klaviyo.

Before suppressing these profiles, consider whether their inactivity extends beyond your business’s expected buying cycle and whether there is still an opportunity to win them back.

Inactivity segment

You can create a segment of inactive profiles to suppress from your account using the following conditions:

• If someone can or cannot receive marketing > Person can receive email marketing
  AND
• Properties about someone > Email is set
  AND
• Properties about someone > Created is at least 180 days ago
  AND
• What someone has done (or not done) > has Received Email at least 5 in the last 72 weeks
  AND
• What someone has done (or not done) > has Opened Email 0 times over all time
  AND
• What someone has done (or not done) > has Clicked Email 0 times over all time
  AND
• What someone has done (or not done) > has Active on Site 0 times over all time
  AND
• What someone has done (or not done) > has Viewed Product 0 times over all time
  AND
• What someone has done (or not done) > has Checkout Started 0 times over all time
  AND
• What someone has done (or not done) > has Placed Order 0 times over all time

Tools to suppress inactive profiles

In Klaviyo, you can suppress profiles on an individual basis and in bulk.

If you manually suppress a profile and then unsuppress it, you must wait 90 days from the original suppression before manually suppressing it again. This restriction does not apply during the first 30 days after your Klaviyo account is created.

Suppress a single email profile

To suppress a single profile for email, there are 2 options:

• Navigate to Audience > Profiles and click View suppressed profiles. Click Add email (or Add email address), enter the email address, and click Add.

• Go to that profile and click Profile actions > Suppress profile. Review the confirmation and click Suppress.

Bulk suppress profiles

1. Navigate to Audience > Lists & segments.
2. Next to the list or segment you’d like to suppress, open the action menu and select Suppress current members.

3. Review the confirmation. If you see suppression choices, select Suppress everyone to suppress the whole list or segment, or Suppress inactive profiles to suppress only the profiles identified as inactive.
4. Click Suppress profiles (or Bulk suppress) to confirm.

This action applies to the current members included in your selection, and does not impact profiles that join after. If a profile in the group is already suppressed, their status will not be impacted.

Learn more about suppressing profiles in bulk.

Suppressing a profile through these options will apply a User Suppressed suppression reason. Manually suppressing a profile does not change their consent status. For example, a Subscribed profile remains Subscribed, but is unable to receive email marketing.

When a profile is manually suppressed, the Manually Suppressed from Email Marketing event appears on the profile's activity log.

Klaviyo will also automatically suppress profiles in the following cases:

There are 2 ways a manual suppression can be removed. A profile may still be unable to receive email marketing if another suppression remains:

1. They resubscribe to email marketing, at which point their manual suppression will be lifted and email marketing consent will be set again.
2. You manually remove a suppression for a profile via their profile page or a bulk unsuppression in Klaviyo. Note that removing a manual suppression will not change the profile’s email marketing consent status.

Learn how to remove suppressions in bulk.

Active profile management vs. list cleaning

Maintaining strong email deliverability requires a proactive effort to exclude unengaged recipients from your regular high volume marketing. This is a different concept than managing your active profiles and rendering profiles unreachable due to long, sustained periods of inactivity with your business.

Outcome

Once suppression is complete, the profiles you selected will no longer be eligible for marketing emails or count toward your email plan’s active profile count. Review your email plan after suppressing profiles, and continue to manage your active profiles on an ongoing basis to avoid paying for contacts that are no longer providing revenue for your business.

Additional resources