‘Uh oh’ was the subject line.
The message arrived in our help desk and set off alarms.
The brand’s deliverability score had plummeted by 1/3 over 6 days! The brand’s marketing manager wanted to know why.
Why did this happen?
How to recover?
How to prevent it from happening again?
Important questions! Deliverability trumps design, after all. The care your team gives to crafting beautiful emails is wasted if the email goes unseen.
So let’s break down this real-life incident to answer those questions…
If your deliverability score plummets someday, you’ll appreciate this perspective. But knowing what to do to recover — and following these practices — will reduce the chances of such a drop from ever happening! (But not eliminate the chance, as the real-life exception described below will show).
What is an email marketing sender deliverability score?
The brand that sent the ‘uh oh’ email uses Klaviyo to send its marketing emails.
Its Shopify store attributes 1/3 of sales to email-referred shoppers. So a drop in deliverability jeopardizes profitability. Fix it fast!
So, what are we fixing exactly?
Let’s dig into it.
The score that plummeted is a number from 1 to 100. The number is an approximation of signals that predict the likelihood of your email arriving in the inbox.
A primary signal is whether the message is considered spam. Another signal is the ratio of emails delivered to emails clicked. Another signal is unsubscribe rate. These and other signals inform the sender’s reputation.
Why the brand’s email deliverability dropped
In this incident, the brand’s plummeting Deliverability Score traced to the reason of a disproportionately high ratio of bounced emails to delivered emails.
So much of sender reputation is ratios. It’s all relative! It’s not that you sent too many emails. It’s how many were opened / clicked / bounced relative to the total sent.
So that’s WHY the score dropped.
But why did the emails BOUNCE?
Bounced because of graphics, content?
Many of the bounced email addresses had been fine, deliverable on the list for months, some for years. During the pivotal 6 day window, some bounced. Why?
A first clue was that most were Apple devices. The next clue was that ‘content’ was a common error code reason. The error suggests a disproportionately large file size in the message envelope. Too many graphics!
Email marketing pros debate the merits of beautifully-designed graphical messages. Are they worth the higher risk of not being delivered to the inbox?
In this brand’s view, yes, they were worth it. Make pretty graphics.
But is it REALLY worth it? The campaign that triggered so many bounces was > 90% graphic-based.
So then ought graphics be minimized? Deliverability trumps design, after all.
When infrastructure fails
Let’s answer that question in the context of this particular incident:
Why would graphical emails be okay to deliver to this brand’s subscribers in the months prior, then suddenly bounce?
With a hat tip to our Klaviyo Champions inner-circle Slack group, we learned that an Apple iCloud privacy protection feature failed for 4 of the 6 days during which the brand’s Deliverability Score plummeted. The failure was intermittent. Not every Apple-hosted email address bounced.
But it’s all about ratios, right? So enough bounced.
This extraordinary circumstance shows that your brand can follow norms for safe sending but still run aground when there’s an infrastructure failure. iCloud fails, emails are graphical, messages get bounced, and Klaviyo’s Deliverability Score plummets.
Graphical emails are fragile
So you do your best, and it’s sometimes not enough. But as a point considering the graphics vs. text debate, graphical emails are relatively fragile.
Imagine this scenario: when iCloud’s private relay servers failed, the graphics failed to load. iCloud servers worked harder, queued large graphical emails. Servers tried repeatedly to deliver the files. During moments of extreme load, iCloud chose not to deliver emails from bulk senders like Klaviyo. Given the bounce, Klaviyo scored it against the brand.
I bet a deeper analysis shows text-oriented emails arrived in the inbox reliably during this 4 day incident. Beautiful, graphical emails ARE relatively fragile.
Let’s jump to the repair process.
How to repair a drop in email deliverability
As the brand was a new client of our agency, freshly onboarded following a 30 Day Sprint, they had already checked these best practice boxes:
- Change Klaviyo’s sending domain to match your store’s domain name. Check.
- Configure the DNS to authorize Klaviyo’s servers to send on behalf of the your brand’s domain name (DMARC, etc.). Check.
- Clean the subscriber list with a validation tool like Emailable. Determine a risk factor score for each email address. Suppress the undeliverable and most risky! Check.
- Evaluate engagement of subscribers. Segment based on a history of opening and clicking on your emails. Prioritize segments from warm to cold. Check.
There’s more to it, but that’s the basics.
If you haven’t already done the basics then that’s where you start your repair process.
A surprising step to repairing email deliverability
Now let’s get to the part of the repair process that seems counter-intuitive: Send more emails.
In the ‘uh oh’ incident, the brand owner didn’t want to do this. No. Why repeat what has caused the harm? First, let’s fix deliverability! Then we’ll send more emails…
Logical enough, but consider: Your reputation fluctuates day by day, so long as you’re sending emails. No emails, no flux.
Klaviyo’s scoring of your account derives from analysis of signals. Opens and clicks are positive signals. Your deliverability score rises — gets fixed — based on positive signals.
The absence of signals from the cessation of sending emails prevents the score from changing. So if you stop then it’s not worsening, but neither is it improving.
Consider the email automations (Flows in Klaviyo) you currently have running. Those are sending emails in the background every day, each time someone takes an action that triggers the automation, like abandoning a cart or placing an order.
Do you turn those off in a scenario like this? Most of the time, no.
Flow emails often get higher engagement than Campaign emails, because they’re sent in direct response to an action someone took. And in scenarios like this, it becomes especially important that your Flow emails have a sufficient ratio of text to balance out any graphics in the email content…
The exception to this ‘keep going’ repair tactic would be if your sending IP address is added to a spam blacklist.
The blacklist expunges listings automatically after a period of days if there’s not additional spam reports. So stop if blacklisted and wait! And check what you’re doing!
Segment to impress Gmail
After the 4 steps listed above, the best next thing you can do to repair Klaviyo’s Deliverability Score is send a (less graphical!) campaign email. Only send it to people who REALLY WANT IT!
Your best fans, the people who want to open and click. Send, assess, repeat.
Importantly, the score measured by Klaviyo matters not as much as Gmail’s perception of your reputation. Klaviyo’s 1 to 100 score helps them monitor whether to disable your sending ability. But Gmail determines whether you go to the inbox.
Gmail’s judgement of your message’s worthiness are among the signals Klaviyo collects to score your account. So Gmail trumps Klaviyo. Impress Gmail, and Klaviyo will raise your score.
Gmail’s influence is more profound than its public market share. Publicly, Google manages 36% of the world’s inboxes. But privately we’ve been told it manages more than twice that amount….
Regardless of the % share of Gmail’s direct control over email, other providers look to Gmail’s perception of worthiness. If Gmail sends your emails to junk, so will other providers. So again, impress Gmail.
It’s not a joke, you can actually measure Gmail’s satisfaction!
Postmaster paces the deliverability repair process
Our 30 Day Sprint had set up the brand with a Google Postmaster account. So we checked across 6 dimensions the level of Gmail’s scoring of this sender.
Google Postmaster showed no red flags for the brand’s account. No yellow warnings.
Postmaster’s scoring is daily. So a poor red score can be reset with a good green score as soon as your next day’s send.
This is why, when in emergency account repair mode, we send multiple campaigns per day. Each send is to a progressively colder segment of the list. In the morning, send to the warmest segment. IF signals are positive, send to a colder segment next.
An email campaign isn’t delivered all-at-once to every subscriber. Gmail and other providers throttle delivery to their customer mailboxes. After evaluating what early recipients do with your email sent to their inbox, Gmail may then deliver the rest of your emails to later recipients’ Promo tab or Spam.
You can mimic this with multiple sends. So if the day’s early sending shows engagement — scored green for good — Gmail might deliver a later send to the Inbox of your colder segment. That’s our objective. Bam! The warm segment just got bigger.
So send, monitor, assess. Repeat.
It’s good advice for all kinds of circumstances when things go wrong: Stop long enough to check the basics, but don’t freeze.
Get moving. Keep sending!
P.S. In 2023 October, a brand found its Klaviyo account disabled. Sending was disabled. A campaign sent to 25k bounced email addresses in error set off alarm bells at Klaviyo. How did they repair their Deliverability Score in 5 weeks and achieve their best Black Friday in 20 years?
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