Klaviyo is a great tool for email marketing, and its segmentation and reporting capabilities make it some of the best in class at being able to keep your lists clean and stay on top of deliverability.
But, Klaviyo’s reporting also makes it really easy to also see how much revenue you’re driving from email in your campaigns and flows. When you’re driving more and more revenue, it’s easy to fall into wanting to send more emails to capture more revenue.
If you’ve read any of our other content, you’ve likely seen us write about this before (no really, we’ve written about deliverability a lot). But the reality is, we get it. The clients we work with are in business to make money, not to have perfect deliverability. And that’s ok.
As you get aggressive with your email campaigns to send increased volume or widen your audience to subscribers who haven’t shown any recent interest and would be classified more as a winback eligible (read this as low chance of engaging again), it’s important to keep an eye on your deliverability and campaign performance to make sure you don’t put yourself at risk.
Poor Email Performance or Poor Deliverability?
Take this campaign from a new client of ours. At a 20% open rate and a 0.5% click rate, we were not happy with the performance given this was both a new product variant release email sent to an audience that we would’ve expected to be much more engaged than they turned out to be.
Was this just a poor email campaign sent near a holiday in a notoriously slow season for marketing? Or a sign of a bigger issue in email deliverability?
Prefer to watch the video explanation? Click here.
Typically, email deliverability issues are not onset all at once. Instead, we typically see an issue starting out in one email service provider before it becomes an issue across all of them.
Email providers like Gmail, Hotmail, and Outlook use different algorithms to determine how to filter spam for their users.
This chart from Klaviyo can be helpful in understanding what the key factors that influence deliverability are, and how they are weighted according to each of the main email providers.
For 99% of Klaviyo accounts we’ve consulted, their issues always start with Gmail and Hotmail, and most of the time the Recipient engagement is the biggest culprit of poor email deliverability. What this means is that Gmail and Hotmail are effectively crowdsourcing your email reputation with their own user base who receives your emails. All of their users engage with your emails all the time? They’re more likely to continue putting your emails in front of their users. Do tons of your emails go unopened by their users? They’re more likely to start placing your emails more proactively in the spam folder (even if people are explicitly opted in to receive them!).
How to evaluate your sender reputation in Klaviyo:
First, open any one of your recent campaigns and click on the Advanced Reports tab. There, you’ll see the engagement of emails across the different email domains that you send to. In our new client example here, you can see there is a big difference in engagement between Gmail and Hotmail and the rest of the domain types.
If we refer back to our chart from Klaviyo, we can see these two domains tend to weigh recipient engagement more heavily than anything else, and so we could see here that it’s quite possible that there were significant deliverability issues for Gmail and Hotmail.
If engagement were consistently ~20% open rates and .5% click across all the domains, we might be more likely to assume this was a poor performing campaign, but with this discrepancy, we suspected we were facing the beginnings of a real deliverability problem.
If all of the engagement was below 10% open rates and 0.5% click rates, we could be facing deliverability issues across all domains. Fortunately, we noticed this early on in our audit for the client and were able to start taking corrective action.
Confirming our suspicions with a G-Lock Apps Deliverability Test
While we’re pretty confident in our suspicions of the problem, not every case of uneven engagement being a sign of a deliverability issue is as clear as the case we outlined in our screenshot, especially if you are noticing more subtle signs.
To verify our deliverability concerns in Gmail and Hotmail, we ran a G-Lock Apps Deliverability test, and sent the seed list the same exact content we sent to the campaign audience.
Sure enough, we could see that we had some spam placement issues, particularly with Gmail and Hotmail.
Fixing Gmail and Hotmail Deliverability issues in Klaviyo
While we aren’t going to cover all the tactics in this article, we did 2 main things to address deliverability issues in Klaviyo for our client. First, we set up domain branding to send through our own sending domain instead of Klaviyo’s shared domain. This effectively “reset” the sender reputation to a new, neutral one.
We then built new segments and audiences to email leveraging both customer behavior on site, as well as more stringent audience criteria based on email engagement. The segments we created were based on the principles found in our article titled “Digging Out of an Email Deliverability Hole“.
With the Sender Reputation reset, we warmed up the new sending domain over the next couple of weeks, and as a result, we saw future campaign engagement increase significantly, especially from Gmail and Hotmail.
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