Almost every D2C brand sends campaigns to an “engaged” segment. The question nobody asks often enough is what engaged actually means in 2026, now that a large share of opens are recorded by a mail app rather than a person.

Opens stopped telling the truth

Apple Mail opens emails automatically. In two D2C accounts we reviewed this quarter, open rates barely moved from send to send: around 68% for a wellness accessories brand and between 57% and 64% for a fine art brand. At the art brand, open rate showed almost no relationship with revenue. A strong subject and a weak one opened at the same rate.

If opens are inflated, any segment built on opens is inflated too.

The test

On five editorial sends, the wellness brand split its engaged audience into three groups: people only Klaviyo marked as engaged, people only a second identity source marked as engaged, and people both sources agreed on.

• Both sources agree: 57,298 recipients, 32 orders, $5,314, $0.093 per recipient.

• Klaviyo only: 124,162 recipients, 7 orders, $853, $0.007 per recipient.

• Second source only: 9,630 recipients, too few orders to judge yet.

The group both sources agreed on was 30% of recipients and brought 71% of the revenue, at 13 times the revenue per recipient of the Klaviyo-only group. The Klaviyo-only group was two-thirds of the audience and almost silent.

Why this matters

Those 124,162 sends were not free. Every email that goes to someone who never reads it tells mailbox providers your mail is less wanted, and that signal affects the people who do read it. A segment that is mostly silent drags down the inbox placement of the segment that buys.

What to do instead

• Define engagement by actions a mail app cannot fake: clicks, site visits, added to cart, purchases. Opens can stay in the definition, but not alone.

• Give open-only profiles a lighter cadence instead of cutting them. Keep them on launches and major offers, and take them off the weekly editorial.

• Write a version for the people who buy. At the same brand, emails written for a specific group (parents, past buyers, jewelry shoppers) earned 2.5 to 33 times more per recipient than the general version.

• Re-check the split every quarter. Who counts as engaged changes as your list ages.

Your engaged segment is probably smaller than Klaviyo says. That is good news: it means the people who buy are easier to find than you think.

Real campaign data, anonymized per client confidentiality.

Tools we use

Klaviyo: the email and SMS platform we build every client account on, including the engagement segments described above.

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