The health of your email list is absolutely vital in terms of email deliverability. The health of your email list essentially makes sure you are sending emails based on defined criteria, so you can maximize the people actually engaging with your communication and at the same time prevent the situation of your emails from being classified as spam as much as possible. Correctly segmenting your subscriber base will help you speed up the onboarding process as you can target the most active users in the beginning without worrying about inactive subscribers lowering the campaign performance.

Recommended Segments

These are the recommended categories, into which you can segment customers according to their engagement with emails.

The NEW category consists typically of very active subscribers, therefore they are eligible for a high frequency of emails. The PASSIVE category is still made up of relatively new users, but they need the option to engage in your emails. However, if you are a very frequent email sender, consider moving the older emails from this category (e.g. 60 to 90 days since sign-up) to a reduced frequency. Try to engage the subscribers by targeting them with your best campaigns and deals.

The LAPSING category is the audience that is starting to tune out. The number one reason for this tends to be the fact that people are getting bombarded with similar content. The number one recommendation is to reduce the frequency and send only major and sales campaigns. Furthermore, try fresh ideas or personalization to improve engagement.

Your goal should be to have the most customers possible in the ACTIVE category. Ideally, a healthy email list will have at least 40% out of all email addresses with active consent in this category. This is your main audience for receiving emails and can be communicated to with all your targeted campaigns.

On the other hand, people in the LAPSED category and in the INACTIVE category should not be emailed if you want to keep your mailing list healthy and should be also avoided during the onboarding and domain warm-up. You are at risk of ruining your domain reputation and being blocklisted any time you are targeting these subscribers.

In order to not send emails to inactive users, you can either filter your customers on a project level through Email List Hygiene Filter or create a segmentation that can be used as an audience for your campaign.

Building the segmentation

Find below examples of how to build the segments in Bloomreach Engagement, keep the order of segments as listed here in order to keep proper results.

New

The first subscription date is less than or equal to 30 days in the past.

Passive

The first subscription date is more than 31 days and less than 90 days ago, the customer received an email but did not interact with it (no opened or clicked event).

Inactive

The first subscription date is more than 90 days ago, the customer received an email but did not interact with it (no opened or clicked event).

Active

The first subscription date is more than 31 days ago and the last interaction ( opened or clicked event) with an email less than 90 days ago.

Lapsing

The first subscription date is more than 31 days ago and the last interaction ( opened or clicked event) with an email more than 90 days ago but less than 180 days ago.

Lapsed

The first subscription date is more than 31 days ago and the last interaction ( opened or clicked event) with an email is more than 180 days ago.

Opt-outs

It is recommended to include the segment of customers who unsubscribed for practical reasons, as it gives you a more realistic overview. This can be done by adding another segment to the first position (in addition to the 6 segments), which will include only people who opted out.

However, if you prefer not to have a seventh segment consisting of addresses without consent, you can always manually add a condition further specifying each and every segment, as shown in the example below. This will serve the same purpose and filter out people without consent.

If you use the model recommended above, these will be your final segments:

A healthy email list is the main means for improving your email deliverability. At the end of the day, you want to build trust among your customers and you want to maximize their engagement. This is a crucial step for achieving just that.

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To see other tips for improving your email deliverability, read Email deliverability tips.