How To Diagnose Email Deliverability Issues In Under 10 Minutes

Last week one of my clients got hit with an huge unexpected bill and needed to generate extra revenue fast.

Before working with me, they'd manually suppressed about 8,000 customers to keep their Klaviyo costs down. 

So I unsuppressed all those customers and we sent a heartfelt email explaining the situation and announcing a sale.

The first campaign generated just over $2K.

But the open rate was 28%, way below our usual 50-60% range.

Since we'd tripled the list size with old customers I was kind of expecting this.

We moved ahead with campaign two.

Open rate plummeted to 17%.

This is where most people either panic and stop emailing completely, or just ignore it and keep sending anyway.

Neither works. You need to quickly figure out what's going on so you can find the actual solution.

Here's my process:

Step 1: Check Klaviyo Deliverability analytics

I looked at open rates by inbox provider. Gmail was at 3%.

That's a massive red flag that your emails are going straight to spam. Especially since 60% of our list uses Gmail.

Step 2: Take a peek in Google Postmaster Tools

Since I figured out the issue was with Gmail, the next stop was Google Postmaster Tools.

I could see right away we had an issue. We had the dreaded red exclamation point. Which means our account wasn’t compliant. And there was was a huge spike in spam complaints the exact day we sent our email.

Step 3: Scale back to your engaged list

The solution here is simple.

Only send campaigns to your most engaged email subscribers (opened or clicked in the last 30 days).

Monitor your open rates. If they're in a healthy 40%-60%, send one more.

Then gradually open up your list engagement to 60, 90, 180 days etc.

If your open rates drop gradually over time, it's usually a list hygiene issue.

But when they have very sudden drop off, it’s an indicator that something specific happened.

Before you keep sending you need to take a few minutes and to figure out what’s going on.

If you’re struggling with low open rates or think you might have a deliverability issue, reach out and we can fix it.

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