Can your email open rate be too high?

Why is a high open rate a warning sign?

Because of who it leaves out. My take is that if you’re getting 60% open rates all the time, you’re not emailing enough of your list.

I saw this with a store earlier this year. Their campaigns were going to a small engaged group, and the open rates looked fantastic. Meanwhile most of the people on their list weren’t getting anything. Every one of those people signed up or bought from them at some point, and nobody was talking to them.

A big open rate feels good in a report. It doesn’t tell you how much of your list you’re actually reaching.

So should you send everything to the full list?

No. That’s the other extreme, and it’s the worst of the lot. Defaulting to everyone who can receive email marketing drags your open rates down, damages your account’s sending reputation and makes every future email perform worse.

On one account I looked into, open rates and email revenue had both dipped. We were just defaulting to the full list, which is the worst email segment to use.

That usually happens because nobody owns segmentation. Everyone assumes someone else is picking the audience, so every send goes to the default. Give it to one person. Their job is to look at the account data and choose the audience for each campaign.

Which segments should you send to?

Mostly your engaged subscribers. In Klaviyo, set up segments for people who’ve engaged in the last 90 days and the last 180 days, and make one of them your default for campaigns.

On one account recently, the plan we set was mostly 180-day engaged, with every third or fourth email resent to the full list. Results have got a lot better since we started actually segmenting that list.

Once the basics are running, you can rotate through a handful of segments:

• 30, 60 and 90-day engaged
• Customers
• Non-customers
• The full list, every third or fourth send

Mailing your engaged people most of the time protects your deliverability and lifts results. The occasional full-list send gives lapsed subscribers a chance to open, click and land back in your engaged segments.

Keep the rule simple enough that whoever runs your sends can actually follow it. “Engaged most of the time, full list every third or fourth email” is easy to remember on a busy Tuesday. A clever rotation that nobody sticks to won’t help you.

What about people who never open at all?

Try to win them back, then suppress the ones who still don’t open, click or buy. Add a sunset flow after that, so the list stays clean without anyone having to remember to do it.

The main reason is account health. Mailing people who never open drags down your sender reputation, so your emails reach fewer of the people who do want them. The second reason is cost. Klaviyo charges for every contact and every send, so you pay for dead profiles to sit there and then pay again to email them. That’s money you could be putting into ads.

While you’re cleaning up, look for odd segments too, like a big block of contacts in a country you don’t ship to. Sometimes Klaviyo’s location guess is just wrong. If it isn’t, decide whether those people should be on your list at all.

Where should you start?

With how often you send. A rotation only works if you’re sending enough emails to rotate through. The easiest thing that any business can do is send two emails a week.

Get to two a week. Send most of them to your engaged segment, and make every third or fourth one a full-list send. The 30, 60 and 90-day splits, the customer and non-customer sends and the sunset flow can all come once that habit is locked in.