Smart Engagement-Based Segments

Letterhead automatically builds dynamic segments based on subscriber engagement, so you can send to your most engaged readers or re-engage inactive ones without any manual list management. What you see depends on how your account sends. Either way, find them under Audience > Segments, labeled and marked with a lock icon.

The available segments

Newsletters on the original audience builder get segments in 30-, 60-, and 90-day windows, and each shows how many readers it currently holds:

• Active Openers — opened at least one newsletter in the time frame.
• Active Clickers — clicked any newsletter link in the time frame.
• Inactive Subscribers — neither opened nor clicked in the time frame.

Accounts that send through the company audience get six engagement categories instead: Loyalists, New & Engaged, Casual, Fading, Ghosts, and Single Newsletter. The 30-, 60-, and 90-day segments above don’t exist for those accounts. Counts show on the Segments tab of a newsletter’s Audience page; the company-wide Segments tab shows the categories without counts.

On those accounts you can also pick Everyone but Ghosts when you schedule a newsletter — everyone who engaged with at least one of your last 10 issues, plus new subscribers who are still in their first 30 days (see below). It shows up in the scheduling Audience dropdown rather than on the Segments tab.

A click counts as engagement

For the five engagement categories and the Ghost-based send options, a reader has engaged with an issue when they opened it or clicked a link in it. Opens alone are unreliable: they miss people who block images, and Apple Mail’s privacy protection distorts them. So a reader who clicks through but never registers an open is not treated as a Ghost, and stays in Everyone but Ghosts.

New subscribers get 30 days before they can be a Ghost

A Ghost is a reader who has engaged with none of your last 10 issues — but that says nothing about someone who wasn’t on your list for most of them. So for their first 30 days on a newsletter, a new subscriber who hasn’t engaged yet counts as Casual instead of a Ghost, and is included when you send to Everyone but Ghosts. A freshly imported list no longer lands in Ghosts all at once. Readers who arrive with a Mailchimp member rating don’t get the grace period, because that rating already describes their history with your list.

How they behave

• They update automatically — subscribers move in and out based on their recent engagement.
• They work like any other segment when scheduling a newsletter — pick one from the Audience dropdown. They aren’t currently available as an export scope; export your whole list instead if you need that data.
• They can’t be edited or deleted — see Can I Delete Segments or Tags? If you need different rules or windows, create a custom segment instead.

Why use them

• Better targeting — send to subscribers who actually engage.
• Re-engagement — identify inactive readers for win-back campaigns, or let List Optimization manage them for you.
• Deliverability — mailing engaged readers protects your sender reputation.

You can also chart how any saved segment engages over time — opens, clicks, and click-to-open against your whole-audience baseline. See Working in Audience for the rest of the Audience toolkit.