Engagement Segments

Engagement segments let you monitor your subscribers' level of interaction with your emails. This is important because it's costly to continue sending to people who have lost interest, and doing so can also affect your deliverability.

In this guide:

• How engagement segments work
  • Subscribers that are not included
  • When engagement segments update
• View engagement segments
• Engagement segment usage
• Remove inactive subscribers
  • Export inactive subscribers
  • Bulk-remove inactive subscribers

How engagement segments work

Subscribers in each of your lists are automatically grouped into one of six engagement segments, based on their activity:

• Active — Subscriber last opened or clicked in past 30 days
• Engaged — Subscriber last opened or clicked between 30 and 90 days ago
• Unengaged — Subscriber last opened or clicked between 90 and 180 days ago
• Dormant — Subscriber last opened or clicked between 180 days and 12 months ago
• Zombies — Subscriber last opened or clicked more than 12 months ago
• Ghosts — Subscriber never opened or clicked any email, 12 months or more since the first email was sent

Your send frequency, and business model, will determine which of the segments are most useful to you. For example, if you only send monthly, your primary indicator of engaged subscribers will be the Engaged segment, not the Active segment.

Subscribers that are not included

You may find that the total number of subscribers across all six engagement segments is less than the total number of subscribed addresses on your list. There are a few instances where subscribers will not be included in any engagement segment:

• When they haven't been sent any emails — For example, they subscribed last week and it's another two weeks before your next campaign is due to send.
• When they haven't received any of your emails — This could be due to your emails not reaching the inbox, emails that have soft bounced, or fake or incorrectly formatted email addresses.
• When they don't open an email within the first 12 months of signup — This is because they've never opened an email, which is a requirement for all engagement segments except for Ghosts. If after 12 months they still haven't opened any emails, they will join the Ghosts segment.

When engagement segments update

The Active engagement segment is updated in real time, while all other engagement segments are updated at 8 a.m. UTC (Coordinated Universal Time).

View engagement segments

Engagement segments are displayed at the top of each subscriber list page in your account, providing an at-a-glance indication of the quality of your list.

To view your engagement segments:

1. Click Email Lists.
2. Select the relevant subscriber list.
3. Click the name of any engagement segment to open a page where you'll see a sample of the subscribers who are in that segment. You can also export subscribers from there.

Useful to know:

• Percentages displayed for engagement segments are rounded up to the nearest whole number. Because of this, it's possible for a segment to report 0% and still have subscribers in it, as they make up less than 0.5% of your total subscribers.
• The "Active" tab below your engagement segments does not refer to engaged subscribers. It just means all subscribers on your list who have not been unsubscribed, bounced or deleted.

Engagement segment usage

You can use engagement segments in the same ways that regular segments can be used, and also as a rule in regular segments. For example, you could reward your most engaged subscribers with exclusive content or special offers to keep them engaged. Sending only to engaged subscribers is also a good tactic to employ if you're having problems with high bounce rates.

Engagement segments also address one of the big email marketing challenges — identifying subscribers who seem to have lost interest in your content. Are there potentially active subscribers at the other end of those email addresses — who may just need a nudge to re-engage — or are you sending emails to a "dead end", for example, an abandoned email address?

It's important to find out if your inactive subscribers can be re-engaged. If not, they're an unnecessary cost to keep around if there's no chance of them bringing a return on investment, and they may damage your deliverability.

For more on how to use your segments, see Email List Segmentation.

Remove inactive subscribers

You can exclude inactive subscribers from campaign sends while working on a re-engagement campaign, but to save money you should periodically remove the subscribers in your lower-level engagement segments. There are two stages to removing inactive subscribers, as explained below.

Export inactive subscribers

First, download the inactive subscribers from your lower-level engagement segments:

1. Click Email Lists.
2. Select the relevant subscriber list.
3. On the list page, click on the name of a lower-level segment, for example: Ghosts.
4. Click Export segment to download a CSV file containing all subscribers in the segment.

If removing subscribers from more than one segment, repeat the steps above for each segment.

Bulk-remove inactive subscribers

After you've exported all of your disengaged subscribers, you can remove your subscribers in bulk. To do this, click on the Remove Subscribers button, just below your engagement segments on the right.

You'll have a few options for how to remove the subscribers. We recommend choosing the Unsubscribe from all lists option (even if you only have one list) because this will also add them to your suppression list, which avoids accidentally importing them again in the future.