From ignored
to $541K.
The situation
A 290K-person list. Only 40K of them mattered.
The brand came to us with a huge Klaviyo account — 290,000 contacts on their list, automations running, campaigns going out. On paper it looked healthy. In reality, only about 40K of those subscribers were genuinely active.
They were sending their newsletter to everyone, letting inactive contacts drag down deliverability, and leaving major revenue on the table from campaigns that could have performed far better. Email attributed for about 20% of revenue from campaigns. It should have been closer to 50%.
We had six months. Here's exactly what we found and how we fixed it.
Three major problems
What we found when we opened the account
Deliverability
- 5% bounce rate
- <20% open rate
- <1% click rate
- 8% unsubscribe from welcome
They were emailing dead accounts, fake addresses, and people who stopped engaging months ago. Every send was poisoning the sender reputation.
Campaigns
- 20% revenue from campaigns
- 80% revenue from automations
- Under-sending to engaged list
- Too much company news
The automation was doing all the heavy lifting. Campaigns were an afterthought — low frequency, wrong content, wrong audience.
Templates
- No personalization
- Weak CTAs
- Long blocks of company text
- No A/B testing data
Every email looked different. No brand consistency, no data on what worked, and the content wasn't driving clicks.
Deliverability fix
Stop mailing everyone. Mail the right ones.
The biggest improvement came from one thing: defining what “active” actually means and only sending to those people. Clicks outrank opens. Someone who opens 30 emails but never clicks will never buy.
The active segment we built (copy this):
Active Subscriber Definition
What happened to the metrics:
Bounce Rate
Suppressed inactive & bounced contacts
Open Rate
Active segment + better subject lines
Click Rate
Strong CTAs, bright buttons, mobile-first
Key learning: If your Winback/Sunset automation can't re-engage a contact, no amount of campaigns will. Suppress them and protect your sender score for the people who actually want to hear from you.
Campaign fix
Build a VIP program. Send more. Talk about products.
A healthy email account targets a 50/50 split between campaigns and automations. We were at 20/80. We fixed it by increasing frequency, creating a VIP segment, and pivoting content from company news to product-driven sends.
Revenue attribution shift:
Healthy accounts aim for 50/50 — neither side should carry everything alone
VIP program growth (Jan → Jul):
VIP Member Growth
0K
What we do now: 2 campaigns per week
Template fix
Six months of A/B testing. Here's what won.
We rebuilt every template from scratch using Milled and ReallyGoodEmails for inspiration, Canva for design, and 10K+ recipients per A/B test before making any judgment. 85% of opens happen on mobile — we designed for that first.
What we tested and what won:
Best campaign ever sent:
Best Campaign
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Key learnings
What this taught us
Clicks beat opens
An open is curiosity. A click is intent. We weight clicks over opens everywhere — in segments, in flow filters, in how we judge campaign success. Someone who opens 30 emails and never clicks will never buy.
Suppress or lose
If your Winback/Sunset automation can't re-engage a contact, no campaign frequency will save them. Suppress them. Protecting deliverability for your real audience is worth more than inflating your list size.
VIP quality > quantity
We grew the VIP list fast through giveaways and referrals — and made the same mistake as the initial newsletter signup. Giveaway hunters aren't buyers. Build VIP programs around purchase history, not vanity metrics.
The outcome
Six months of results
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Results Disclosure: Results described in this case study are specific to this client engagement and are not guaranteed. Individual results will vary based on budget, industry, competitive landscape, market conditions, execution, and other factors. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Machina makes no representation that any client will achieve similar outcomes.