How to create a sunset flow

You will learn

Learn how to set up a sunset flow that is designed to phase out customers who are no longer engaging with your brand. You can use this flow as a last-ditch effort to win back their business, and then delete or suppress anyone who is not responsive. This will help you maintain a clean list and prevent you from sending to unengaged subscribers and possibly harming your deliverability.

When to sunset subscribers

Continually sending emails to subscribers who never open or click them signals to email providers (Gmail, Hotmail, etc.) that you are not a reputable sender. Eventually, these providers will begin placing your emails in the spam folder. To avoid this, you must regularly clean your lists. Before giving up on these contacts completely, try to re-engage them using a winback flow and then offer them a last chance to remain a subscriber via a Sunset flow.

Before creating a sunset flow, set up a winback flow, which attempts to draw lapsed customers back in. Typically, this flow offers promotions and high-quality content to grab the reader’s interest as well as a prominent unsubscribe/manage preferences link. For more details, check out this Guide to Creating a Winback Flow.

Unlike with a winback flow, which typically targets previous customers only, a sunset flow is often sent to any unengaged subscriber — i.e., someone who has signed up for messages from you but hasn’t interacted with them for a certain period of time. The latter flow will offer such contacts a last chance to keep receiving your messages. Setting up your sunset segment and flow also makes it simple to clean your list of anyone who is no longer interacting with your brand.

For this flow, you need to know who is considered “inactive” for your business. This largely depends on your sending schedule. If you send daily, three months of inactivity is a good indicator that someone is unengaged, while six months is better if you’re a monthly sender.

Set up a sunset segment

A sunset flow is triggered by being added to a particular segment. Your segment should be defined by the following engagement criteria:

If you have a winback flow, you need to add another condition to this segment. However, which condition you use depends on whether you want people to use the winback and sunset flows together or separately. If you want to use them together, you must make sure recipients have time to completely go through the winback flow before they enter the sunset flow. In addition, add a condition to include only those who have received the last message in the winback flow.

Alternatively, you could exclude those who have entered the winback flow from receiving the sunset flow. In this case, add an AND connector and specify that someone has received a winback flow email zero times over all time.  

By capturing people who have engaged in the past, but not recently, you'll be able to weed out anyone who is totally unengaged and unlikely to respond to your content. Anyone who has been on your newsletter list for more than 90 days and has never opened or clicked an email should simply be suppressed. They do not need to go through a Sunset flow since they are highly unlikely to respond and sending more emails to them may negatively impact your deliverability.

You may want to add an OR connector to the segment outlined above that includes people who have placed an order at least once over all time. This makes the segment more similar to a winback flow, and if you add this condition, consider combining the two flows into a single re-engagement flow.

Set up a sunset flow

After setting up your sunset segment, you will need to build a flow that is triggered by being added to your sunset segment. We recommend using a pre-built sunset flow from the flows library.

1. Navigate to the Flows tab.
2. Click Create Flow to view the flows library.
3. In the searchbar, search for "sunset" to see Klaviyo's pre-built sunset flow.
4. Click on the pre-built "sunset unengaged subscribers" flow.
5. In the trigger dropdown, select your sunset segment.
6. Click Create Flow at the bottom on the modal.
7. Customize the message content to match your brand.

Flow content best practices

We recommend using plain text and being as personal as you can in the email by using the {{ first_name }} tag and a from address like "Marissa from Klaviyo." Include content about any new products that have been released since they've become unengaged and consider offering a discount to entice them to buy. 

You will want to include prominent unsubscribe and manage preferences links, in case subscribers want to update their settings rather than unsubscribe completely. 

In the email(s), give recipients the option to browse your site or otherwise interact with you if they do want to remain subscribed. Below is an example from Princess Awesome.

In addition, indicate in the email subject line that you will say goodbye to these subscribers if they continue to not engage (e.g., “Is it time to say goodbye?” or “We miss you already”). For instance, the email below from Framebridge has the subject line: “Goodbyes are hard…”

Create a suppression segment

Create a new segment that leverages the tag you give to unengaged subscribers who go through your sunset flow and have not opened or clicked a message lately: 

• Properties about someone > Suppress equals true AND
• What someone has done (or not done) > Opened email zero times in the last 90 days AND
• What someone has done (or not done) > Clicked email zero times in the last 90 days

You will need to monitor and periodically suppress this segment. Do so whenever you perform your regular list cleaning — at least two to three times a year is recommended. To do this:

1. Click the Manage Segment dropdown.
2. Select Export Segment to CSV.
3. Navigate to the Profiles tab.
4. In the upper right-hand corner, click Suppressed Profiles.
5. Click Upload File to upload this CSV file. 
6. You can also exclude this segment from all of your campaigns in the interim to ensure that you don't email anyone who is not engaged.

Additional resources

Read about similar flows in the Klaviyo Help Center:

• How to create a winback flow
• How to create a segment-triggered flow
• How to update profile property action