🐝 2 beehiiv Automations for Excellent Email Deliverability

When we re-launched Sunday Sales Delight, we did it with Michelle’s existing list of SSD subscribers. Today, as I’m writing this post, less than 25% of those original subscribers remain. We manually unsubscribed 75% of the list because they weren’t opening or clicking on our emails.

Unengaged subscribers worsen deliverability, making it harder for our emails to get to the inboxes of our loyal fans. They’re dead weight. So we got rid of them. Now, we have a lean, mean email list of hyper-engaged subscribers.

And we’re able to maintain this high-quality list because of 2 set-it-and-forget-it email automations in beehiiv. Most email service providers will have ways to automate engagement tracking. I’m using beehiiv as an example because that’s what we use for SSD.

1. Track new subscriber engagement

This automation gets rid of low-quality subscribers from the jump. Here’s how it works in beehiiv.

• A new subscriber opt-ing in triggers the automation

• If the subscriber doesn’t open or click on any of our emails for 2 weeks, they’re marked as inactive (unsubscribed)

• If they do open or click on an email within the 2 week time frame, they’re marked as active

Here’s what the visual workflow looks like in beehiiv automations.

When you have this automation turned on, you can turn off double opt-in. It gives you the same effect as a double opt-in while still allowing you to send regular emails to the subscriber.

2. Re-engage unengaged subscribers

This is the money automation. It’s also a wake-up call for people who care about vanity metrics like subscriber count. Here’s how the automation works.

• beehiiv runs a daily check for unengaged subscribers based on your parameters. I’ve got it set to “30 days without opens or clicks.” We only send a weekly email for now so that works for us. If you email more often, e.g. daily, you’ll want to be more aggressive. E.g. “7 days without opens or clicks.”

• Once beehiiv detects a subscriber is unengaged, they get 3 emails over 24 hours asking them to engage or be marked inactive (unsubscribed.) Any open or click will remove them from the automation

• After the last email, we wait 6 days and then anyone who’s still unengaged is marked inactive. So they have a whole week to show us they still want to be on our list

Here’s what the visual workflow looks like in beehiiv automations.

Why not keep the unengaged subscribers on your list?

That’s an option and I’ve done it myself with other lists. It makes sense when you’re using a CRM and want to keep contact history intact. If you decide to keep the unengaged subscribers, you can stop emailing them except to send a re-activation email once or twice a month.

But to be honest, why bother? It’s like chasing after a love interest who’s not into you. I’d rather focus my energy on the subscribers who are paying attention and engaging.

SSD ❤️ beehiiv

The Sunday Sales Delight newsletter is curated every week using beehiiv. We love beehiiv because it makes running a newsletter SO simple in so many different ways. One example: newsletters are published to our website instantly by default.

If you’d like to know more about how we use beehiiv, we’ll be publishing a detailed guide/review soon. Until then, if you’d like to check out beehiiv for yourself, go here.

About Nabeel Azeez

Nabeel Azeez is a direct response copywriter and the owner of Dropkick Copy, a B2B email marketing agency.