Most DTC brands have never built a sunset flow. The ones that have usually built it wrong, treating it like a formality instead of the thing actively protecting every other send they make.
A sunset flow finds subscribers who’ve stopped engaging, no opens, no clicks over a real stretch of time, and either makes one last attempt to win them back or suppresses them from regular sends entirely. Its real job isn’t about those individual subscribers. It’s protecting your sender reputation with Gmail, Yahoo, and everyone else, who use engagement rates across your whole list to decide whether your future emails land in the inbox or the spam folder.
Skip the flow entirely and unengaged contacts pile up indefinitely. Every send goes to a growing pool of people who never open anything, dragging down your aggregate engagement rate and signaling to mailbox providers that your email may not be wanted, even by the subscribers who genuinely are engaged.
Some brands have a version of this flow that just tags unengaged contacts without ever suppressing them from regular sends. The flow exists, the tag gets applied, and the same contacts keep getting every campaign anyway. That defeats the whole point.
A real one identifies contacts with no opens or clicks in 90-120 days, sends one or two final emails with a genuinely different approach, ask directly if they still want to hear from you, or offer something specific to earn attention back, and suppresses anyone who still doesn’t respond.
Check your overall engagement percentage in Klaviyo right now. More than 25-30% of your active list with no opens in 90-plus days, and no flow actively addressing it, and that inactive segment is very likely affecting deliverability for your whole list, not just itself.
A sunset flow feels like giving up on subscribers, which is exactly why it’s easy to skip. It’s closer to pruning, cutting the part that’s actively dragging down everything else so the engaged majority of your list keeps landing where it’s supposed to.
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