How do you know if deliverability is a problem?

The answer is simple - look at your open rates, and run a test on GlockApps.

The main flow you need to look at is the welcome flow. Assuming that it is triggered using the pop-up that makes it clear the user has to expect an email with your welcome offer, the open rate of the first email should be at around 50% or higher. If it is lower, you have a problem.

The GlockApps test will show you exactly where your emails are landing. If your open rates are low, spam is the most common culprit.

We’ll assume that the technicals are good (domain is verified, DMARC, SPF, DKIM are set up). If they are not, the fix takes 5 minutes, just follow Klaviyo’s instructions for verifying your domain.

However, fixing them will not solve the problem if your sender reputation already took a hit.

You need to show the email providers (Google, Yahoo, etc) that you are not spamming people. Sounds very simple, but how?

You need to get consistently high engagement rates on your emails and stop sending emails with low engagement.

You do that long enough, and your sender reputation will be back on its feet.

Now, let’s get to the specifics.

Cull the underperformers

The first thing you need to do in this situation is disable the emails with the worst engagement. Don’t stress over it - your 10% open rate abandoned checkout email is not converting anyone anyway until the deliverability is fixed.

Go through your flows one at a time and pause everything below 30% open rate.

Most likely, you will be left with just a few emails in the welcome flow and maybe one or two in the abandonment flows or the post-purchase flow. With AngleRazor, the only emails left active were the first two in the welcome flow.

If you have more left, good news - your sender reputation is not the worst we’ve seen.

Set up double opt-in

Go to your welcome flow list in Klaviyo and turn on the double opt-in.

Normally, you’d want to keep it off to reduce friction.

But turning it on means that your welcome flow will only be sent to people who really want to receive it. You will avoid sending to typos (@ymail.com emails and such) and people who are only giving you their email to make the pop-up go away. And this will lead to better engagement.

Segment your top engagers

Go to your lists in Klaviyo and create a segment like this:

Depending on your audience size and the frequency of the campaigns, adjust it. If you are not sending campaigns regularly and have a small list, use the settings above.

If your list is big and you send often, select those who have opened at least 3 times or more. Depending on the results of the first “medication” campaign, you may want to further adjust it.

Start sending campaigns…

Once the segment is ready, start preparing and sending campaigns once a week.

Don’t make them too salesy and loaded with images, as that is more likely to trigger spam filters.

The best choice would be simple, educational emails. If you have a point of reference with past campaign that had performed well, work from that.

Send the first one when the audience is most likely to open it (usually the evening of Tuesday or Thursday. Then, look at its open rates. You want them to be above 50%. If they are, send the next campaign to the same segment. If they are lower, narrow down the targeting

…and do not stop

You will need to send these campaigns for a month, so four campaigns in total. In that time, avoid sending anything else to a less engaged segment. Your emails will land in spam and you will only hurt your sender reputation more.

The campaigns should not stop once the sender reputation is fixed. You can switch them to a broader targeting and experiment more with the content, just make sure to keep the open rates above 50%.

This will help maintain your sender reputation, and get you more sales in the process.

Evaluate

After a month of reputation repair campaigns, you can start gradually turning on the flows you previously deactivated.

Don’t just start sending everything at once, especially if your flows have many emails. Turn the first 2-3 back on first, wait a few days or a week, depending on your volume of traffic, then analyze.

If you’ve done everything right, the open rates should be back to 40-50%, depending on the flow. You will also notice the conversions ramping up.

It will also be a good time to turn off double opt-in, just watch closely to make sure it doesn’t hurt the open rates too much.

For AngleRazor, the improvement was drastic. Before we executed this strategy, all of their emails were landing into spam and Klaviyo’s revenue was close to zero.

After this, the sender reputation was fixed and we immediately jumped to over 40% of total revenue coming from Klaviyo, with engagement rates well above average.