The Deliverability Fix That Increased Email Revenue by 65% in 45 Days

I started working with a new apparel brand about two months ago. The founders started it a few years ago as a side hustle with real ambition to scale it. 

But one thing was blocking everything: their email wasn't working. 

Everything was going to spam. Welcome series. Cart abandon. All of it.

The founders they had no clue why email marketing didn’t work and no idea where to even start to fix it.

Here's how we increased their email revenue by 65% in 45 days.

Step 1: Tweak the Pop-up

First up was adjusting their pop up.

Here's what was happening: When people would opt in to the email list, the pop-up would immediately display the coupon code. 

The problem is people would save that coupon, close the pop-up, and then never actually check their email. They already had what they wanted. 

So the welcome series got ignored. 

We removed the coupon from the pop-up entirely. 

Instead, we added a post-sign up message that said "Check your email or spam folder for your exclusive coupon." 

Now people had to actually go find their email and they knew it might be in spam too.

Getting people to move emails out of the spam folder into their inbox really helps send positive signals to Gmail.

Step 2: Rebuild the Automations

Next we tackled the automations.

Their previous agency set up all image based emails. 

Which are fine, but not when you’re trying to fix a massive deliverability crisis. 

We stripped everything back to text. One image, max.

Why? 

Because when Gmail sees an email that's mostly text with one image and one link, that's the format inbox providers want to deliver. 

It looks like a legitimate email.

We also encouraged people to reply. 

Because here's what most people don't understand about deliverability: replies are liquid gold for Gmail.

When someone replies to your email and you reply back, Gmail watches that. 

That's the engagement Gmail actually cares about. That's a signal that says "this person wants this email." 

Step 3: Plain Text Campaigns & Segmentation

Here’s another problem:

They hadn’t sent any campaigns in about five months. That's a huge problem for deliverability. 

So we started sending text-based emails to their most engaged segment. 

Only people who had opened and clicked in the last 30 days and we spilt our list by Gmail vs non Gmail subscribers.

This let us monitor open rates and click rates closely. When everything looked solid (aiming for 50-60% open rate, 1%-2% click rate), we increased the segment by 10-20%. 

Then sent the next campaign and repeated. 

We started with 50 people and over six weeks, scaled to 1,000 people. (Almost 60% of their entire database)

The Results

This whole process took about 45 days.

Over seven weeks, their flows went from going straight to spam and not converting to generating real revenue:

A 65% increase in revenue with 87% coming from flows. 

Her Gmail domain reputation improved to high and our emails were landing in the inbox.

Look, I know this isn't the usual "OMG WE INCREASED REVENUE BY $5,000,000 IN THREE MONTHS!!"

But you can't scale any business with massive foundational holes.

Fixing deliverability and setting up solid automations and campaign workflows is an asset that compounds immensely over time.

That's what matters.

If your email setup feels like it's not working, there's usually a reason. It's probably not your copy or strategy. It's your foundation.

Let's talk about yours. Reply to this email and let me know what's happening with your deliverability.

Got something you’d like me to talk about? Reply to this email, I do my best to reply to them all.

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