March 23, 2023
Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to connect with your audience and drive business results. However, with the rise of spam filters and inbox algorithms, ensuring your emails land in the inbox can be a challenge. That's where Klaviyo comes in - a popular email marketing platform that offers powerful tools to help improve email deliverability, but even with all the tools given, and making sure all deliverability metrics were in a healthy range like bounce rate, unsubscribe rate, and spam complain rate, we still landed in spam. Why?
You might be asking yourself the same question and if so, this blog post is for you.
In this post, we'll cover 9 obvious and not-so-obvious ways to guarantee you land in the inbox using Klaviyo in 2023.
Monitoring your email metrics can help you identify any issues with deliverability and make adjustments as needed. Klaviyo provides detailed email analytics, such as open rates, click-through rates, as well as more specific deliverability metrics like bounce rates, unsubscribe rates, and spam compliant rates that all can contribute to you ending up in the spam folder. Thin about it, if ESP's like Gmail or Yahoo see you're getting terrible open rates on your emails, a high number unsubscribes, or a ton of spam complains it's easy to see why they'd label you as spam.
An easy way for anyone to improve deliverability is to clean your list. Once a quarter list cleaning and implementing double opt-in.
Double opt-in requires subscribers to confirm their email address by clicking a link in a confirmation email. This ensures that only legitimate email addresses are added to your list, reducing the likelihood of bounces, spam complaints, and unsubscribes. This works best if you're seeing a clear negative trend in those deliverability metrics.
Klaviyo makes it easy to implement double opt-in by providing customizable confirmation email templates and automation workflows.
Cleaning your list can be as simple as creating a segment for those who haven't engaged with your brand in the last 120 or 180 days, sometimes called a "sunsetting segment"
You can also create flows through the customer journey between sign up and sunsetting like a "Winback flow" or and a "Sunsetting flow" to send emails to non-purchasers after a designated time period to win their business before they're labeled as unengaged.
A major mistake some brands make is sending emails to their entire list. Not everyone engages with emails every week, let alone yours specifically. This increases the chances that you end up in spam.
Segmenting your email list into engaged and unengaged allows you to send targeted and personalized content to your subscribers depending on where they are in the customer journey, which can increase engagement and reduce the likelihood of unsubscribes. Klaviyo offers a range of segmentation options, such as by location, behavior, and purchase history, making it easy to create tailored campaigns for each segment.
I will also often exclude emails that have bounce over 5 times from campaigns as well to make sure our metrics are as healthy as possible.
Your sender reputation is a score assigned by internet service providers (ISPs) that indicates the trustworthiness of your email program. A high sender reputation can improve deliverability, while a low score can result in your emails being sent to the spam folder. Klaviyo provides tools to monitor your sender reputation and offers recommendations to improve it.
You can use sites like https://senderscore.org/, https://postmaster.google.com/, https://www.talosintelligence.com/, and many more to monitor your ender reputation.
With Klaviyo, you can use either a shared IP address or a dedicated email address. A shred is typically best for a new domain with no sending reputation. The issue becomes when too many people in the pool have improper sending practices or bad sender reputations.
A dedicated ID address, or Dedicated Sending Domain, is, as it sounds, your own dedicated IP address that only you cans end from or influence. This is best for brands that already have good sending habits and want to take their deliverability into their own hands.
With a few simple steps you can get setup on your own Dedicated Sending Domain and after a warming period you should noticed considerably better deliverability.
Not enough people are doing this.
SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are three email authentication protocols that are used to help prevent email fraud and abuse, and to ensure that emails are delivered successfully.
SPF (Sender Policy Framework) is a protocol that allows domain owners to specify which IP addresses are allowed to send email on their behalf.
By creating an SPF record in their DNS (Domain Name System) settings, domain owners can tell receiving email servers which IP addresses are authorized to send email from their domain. This helps prevent email spoofing, where a sender forges the "From" address in an email to make it appear as if it came from a different domain.
DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) is another email authentication protocol that uses digital signatures to verify the authenticity of an email message. When an email is sent, the sender signs it with a private key, and the receiving email server verifies the signature using the corresponding public key stored in the sender's DNS settings. DKIM helps ensure that the email was not altered in transit and that it originated from an authorized sender.
DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) is a protocol that builds on SPF and DKIM to provide a policy framework for email authentication. DMARC allows domain owners to specify what should happen to emails that fail SPF and/or DKIM authentication, such as being rejected, quarantined, or marked as spam. DMARC also provides feedback to domain owners on how their emails are being handled by receiving email servers.
Together, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC provide a comprehensive framework for email authentication, helping to ensure that emails are delivered successfully and that they are not forged or altered in transit. By implementing these protocols, domain owners can help protect their reputation and their recipients from spam, phishing, and other types of email fraud.
Since installation and setup differs based on your domain registrar, a quick Google search should help you find how to do this for your brand.
WARNING: If done incorrectly this can TAKE DOWN YOUR ISTE. If you want help with this contact us.
The design and layout of your emails can affect deliverability. Adding plain text emails into your email marketing mix, making images in your email smaller, and if you use a lot of HTML in your emails test out using text blocks in the email while keeping it on-brand can all aid in deliverability.
Klaviyo offers a range of customizable email templates that are optimized for deliverability, ensuring your emails look great and land in the inbox.
Certain words and phrases in your email content can trigger spam filters, which can affect deliverability. Klaviyo provides a spam checker tool that analyzes your email content and identifies any potential triggers. By avoiding these words and phrases, you can increase the likelihood of landing in the inbox.
Here are a few specific tips:
Testing your emails before sending them to your entire list can help identify and fix any deliverability issues. A free tool to check your overall send health is https://www.mail-tester.com/ and if you're lookig for software that's more extensive that can show you what the email will look like in different inboxes like Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, etc you cna use either https://litmus.com/ or https://www.emailonacid.com/
In conclusion, email deliverability is a critical component of any successful email marketing program. Some of our clients have seen an increase of email revenue by as much as DOUBLE just by optimizing and prioritizing their deliverability. By implementing these nine strategies using Klaviyo in 2023, you can improve your chances of landing in the inbox and achieving your business goals.
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