#33 - Walking the Deliverability Tightrope

I sometimes wonder…

If you put 10 email marketers in a room, would they only yap about:

• Deliverability

• Attribution

• A/B Testing

But it’s true, it’s our bread and butter.

Of which, deliverability is the cornerstone (without it you can forget about inboxing).

And look at me yapping. Let’s get right into it.

1) The Issue

At Chronos, we run monthly deliverability checks for our clients (old and new).

There are three categories we classify accounts in:

a) Red Alert (Urgent action needed)
b) Yellow Alert (Not urgent, but eyes open)
c) Green (Doing great, share strategies across other accounts)

We found 15 red alert accounts over the course of three months, varying from high Klaviyo spam reports, low domain reputations, to concerning Google Postmaster (GP) spam numbers (impt note: if you don’t have GP setup, make sure you do - here’s a guide).

This is concerning, because deliverability issues are like monoxide poisoning. Not an immediate problem, but left long enough to fester can lead to death (of your domain, and huge tanks in email revenue).

2) Examples of How We Solved It

i) Brand A was suffering from Klaviyo spam rates of 0.13%, and a low domain rep.

Bounce rates and spam rates were killing our deliverability, but we noticed one peculiar thing - most bounces were coming from comcast.net.

(quick interlude - I went back and forth on this, and realized the best way to illustrate our processes would be structured steps vs just paragraph chunks so that’s what I’m doing below)

a) List Cleaning
We suppress users who have received at least 10 emails from us, but not open/clicked emails for the past year.

Also, we exclude soft bounces (4) over all time and a general unengaged segment

The number 5 is a good baseline, but can be modified based on how often you’re emailing and the type of products you sell.

What you can do is to clone the segment multiple times, and the moment you see a HUGE dip, is when you know where you should ‘stop’ (eg for the image below I’m stopping at 8).

b) Exclude comcast emails from campaign/flows
From what we discovered above.

c) Enable ‘unsubscribe from all future emails’ for all lists being used
Giving users an ‘out’ if they get irritated with our emails, vs marking us as spam.

d) Creating a Sunset flow
Getting users who are unengaged out of our list (so they don’t pull metrics down).

e) A/B testing text-based vs HTML for cart recovery/NCA flows
Grossly oversimplifying this, but sometimes text based delivers better than emails with a ton of designs.

ii) Brand B had subpar open and click rates, and a high spam complaint rate

This was because they just migrated over to a new domain, so a warm up is crucial.

Imagine you’re a postman - you’ve been delivering letters around the block for over 5 years, and know the neighbors, kids, and dogs around the block. They make small talk with you, and you’re able to go onto their lawns without much resistance.

This is you on a tenured dedicated sending domain.

However, you’re a new postman on a new block when you switch domains (nobody has any idea who you are).

You’ll need to ease into things, slowly popping over once or twice (cookies recommended) and having them slowly warm up to you.

That’s why warm up is never a ‘good to have’, it’s a ‘must-have’.

Apart from that, they were not using the best segments, sending to almost 100% of their list without the proper exclusion segments.

That’s like strolling onto the yard of a new neighbor trying to lift their kids.

You’ll want to start with your most engaged, trusted, and loyal subscribers as they’re likely to engage. From there, they’d be happy to wingman you to other neighbors, as well as warn you about the ‘bad’ ones you don’t want to visit.

A little more abstract, but hope the picture helped with visualization.

iii) Brand C had incredibly high unsubscribe and spam rates

This one’s a little more intuitive, and it’s because they went from barely sending emails (themselves) to (us) sending more frequent campaigns.

The standard stuff of list cleaning applies, but we also sent out an email regarding preferences (on how often they like to be emailed), and used that as a segmentation for our campaigns.

And that’s a wrap!

If you noticed, we follow a systematic process of diagnosing the problem, what the root cause is, then deploying the solution.

So often we see others diagnose the problem, then run around like headless chickens pulling every lever trying to ‘fix things’.

Deliverability is really a cornerstone of email marketing, and something we take incredibly seriously for our brands.

If you’re running into any deliverability issues, or just want a second opinion on things, feel free to pop on over here and we’ll be happy to take a look for ya.

Oh, and also, have a great weekend ahead :)