You know that sinking feeling when you discover that your email list—the one you've been proudly growing for years—is actually working against you? That's exactly where Habibi NY found themselves with over 160,000 contacts, but roughly 87% of subscribers were unengaged, inactive, or spam traps. This wasn't just an engagement problem; it was an existential threat to their email channel.

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Here's what every growth professional with established email programs learns the hard way: bad subscribers don't just ignore your emails—they actively damage your ability to reach good subscribers. The massive unengaged list was dragging down deliverability, inflating costs, and creating risk of landing in spam folders for their most valuable customers. Without meaningful segmentation, campaigns were being blasted to broad audiences, resulting in low conversion rates and minimal relevance for different customer groups. At Glued, we've seen this pattern repeatedly: brands that built large lists quickly but never focused on list quality end up with email programs that look successful on paper but underperform dramatically on revenue. The solution isn't trying to re-engage 87% of inactive subscribers—it's building a sustainable system around the 13% who actually want to hear from you.

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This is where most luxury brands make a critical mistake with email marketing. They treat their list like a single audience and wonder why luxury products aren't converting through generic promotional campaigns. At Glued, we approach luxury email differently: we build engagement through relevance and exclusivity rather than volume and frequency.

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Every marketing executive with premium products faces this personalization challenge: how do you create meaningful email experiences for diverse customer segments without overwhelming your team or budget? For Habibi NY, our Email Marketing strategy started with a deep list audit to identify engagement levels, spam risks, and segmentation opportunities. We built a tiered approach with engagement-based filters to protect deliverability, interest-driven segmentation leveraging past purchase behavior and fragrance preferences, and redesigned core automations to align with actual customer behavior rather than generic best practices. The shift from generic broadcasts to 12 targeted campaigns per month meant each message felt personally relevant rather than mass-distributed. At Glued, we believe that luxury email marketing isn't about reaching everyone—it's about meaningfully connecting with the right people who value what you offer.

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Here's the counterintuitive truth that will change your next email strategy discussion: sometimes the best way to grow email revenue is to shrink your email list. Habibi NY achieved their goal of 25% email attribution and exceeded it, reaching 28% of total store revenue from Klaviyo while generating $320K in attributed sales. But the real breakthrough was the 23% year-over-year growth in automated flow revenue, proving that quality engagement drives sustainable growth.

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You know that pressure you feel to justify email marketing ROI while watching engagement rates decline as your list grows? This approach eliminates that paradox entirely. By cleaning the list, rebuilding sender reputation, and delivering highly relevant content to genuinely interested subscribers, every email performed better across all metrics. The $175K from campaigns and $146K from flows proved that luxury brands can build substantial email revenue when they optimize for customer value rather than subscriber volume. At Glued, we've learned that in luxury categories especially, reaching fewer people with more relevant messages always outperforms reaching more people with generic messages. The 28% revenue attribution demonstrated that email can become a primary revenue channel for luxury brands when it's treated as a relationship-building tool rather than a broadcasting platform.

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If you're struggling with declining email performance despite growing subscriber counts, these insights will transform how you approach list management and luxury email marketing. The opportunity is massive because most premium brands are still optimizing for quantity metrics that work against their actual business goals.

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1. Audit engagement before optimizing campaigns: We discovered that 87% of Habibi's massive list was actively hurting their email performance, not just providing zero value. Before investing in better subject lines or creative design, you need to understand whether your emails are actually reaching engaged subscribers. At Glued, we've learned that list quality audits often reveal more revenue opportunity than campaign optimization for established brands. If you want to book a call with us, we can show you exactly how this audit process works and what it reveals about your current list health.

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2. Segment by behavior and interest, not just demographics: Luxury fragrance customers buying Desert Oud and Jasmin Oud have completely different motivations and preferences that require different messaging approaches. We leveraged past purchase behavior, site activity, and quiz results to create interest-driven segments that received content aligned with their specific fragrance preferences rather than generic luxury messaging.

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3. Protect deliverability like your business depends on it: Because it does. Engagement-based filtering isn't just about better metrics—it's about ensuring your emails actually reach the customers who want to buy from you. At Glued, our Email Marketing approach always prioritizes deliverability protection because the most beautifully crafted email is worthless if it lands in spam folders.

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4. Build flows around actual customer behavior, not assumptions: The 23% year-over-year growth in automated flow revenue came from redesigning welcome, post-purchase, and replenishment sequences based on how luxury customers actually engage with fragrance brands rather than generic ecommerce flow templates. Luxury buying cycles, gifting patterns, and repurchase behavior are different from standard retail.

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5. Quality engagement beats quantity engagement every time: Here's the insight that every marketing leader should take to their next email performance review: reaching 13% of your list with relevant, valuable content will always generate more revenue than reaching 100% of your list with generic promotional messages. At Glued, we proved with Habibi NY that shrinking to focus on engaged subscribers doesn't just improve metrics—it improves profitability. Start with our Free Website Audit & Redesign to understand exactly how your current email performance compares to engagement-optimized benchmarks, and discover why the most successful luxury email programs prioritize subscriber value over subscriber volume.

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