Deliverability and Compliance AMA

Hey @chris141331,

Thanks for those great questions! I’ve included them as talkings points to discuss with @Apollonia and their thoughts on this matter!

Don’t forget to check back on November 19 to see what other Community members are asking and curious about!

David

Happy Friday Klaviyo Community!

It’s that time of the year again and Black Friday and Cyber Monday are just around the corner! I want to thank everyone for submitting their wonderful questions and sharing what they were curious about when it comes to deliverability and compliance! 

After sitting down and reading through many of the questions with @Apollonia , we came to notice that many of the questions were similar. So, we distilled many of the questions together and were able to come up with the questions and answers below!

1. How do I resend an email to customers without impacting my sending reputation

   1. Great question! During the holiday season, you definitely want everyone to see and know more about your promotions. I recommend resending email only to customers who have not opened the first initial promotional outreach versus simply resending the campaign again. You can do this by either creating a new segment as your recipient group or by simply cloning the campaign and creating a segment of customers who have already opened the original email to be used as your exclusion group. 

2. I just started and set up a dedicated sending domain, is there any faster way to warm my new sending domain?

   1. Warming takes a minimum of 30 days, if it’s done well. This is because we know that it takes at least this long to train an inbox provider that you are a trustworthy sender after you’ve made a change to something like your IP or a Dedicated Sending Domain. As long as you are sending consistently, and to a consistently increasing number of profiles, it doesn’t need to take longer than this. Rushing or trying to cut corners during this pivotal time can draw out the process even longer if your reputation is damaged.

3. How do I know if someone is highly engaged versus low engaged?

   1. The easiest way to see if contacts are engaged or not is if they’ve interacted with your emails such as opening or clicking your email outreaches. A good way to define this would be creating segments in Klaviyo for these engaged and unengaged contacts. Engagement is measured by the consistency someone is interacting with your content, rather than how recently they opted in.

4. Do bounced emails affect my deliverability?

   1. Love this question! It really depends on the bounce type of your emails! Soft bounces have little to no impact on your sending reputation, though they can eventually add up over time. Hard bounces on the other hand do impact your sending reputation. For this reason you’ll want to monitor emails that have bounced. Seeing bounced emails are also a great indicator of a deliverability issue. We’re not talking about a few bounces here and there, but a slow increase in the number of bounced emails or a large number of bounces all at once are all key indicators.

5. How does increasing my sending volume during BFCM impact my deliverability? Are there any recommendations for this?

   1. It’s no surprise that you’ll want to increase your sending volume during this time frame! Sending to a larger audience will impact your deliverability - especially if they include cold and unengaged audiences. That’s just a fact. But there are ways to mitigate and minimize this by being smart about how you send and recover from this process. When sending to a larger audience, I would recommend sending the campaign using our batch sending method. This will split up your larger audience into smaller sends throughout a specified timeframe. The recovery portion of this would be for every larger audience you send to, the next two to three campaigns at minimum should only be to your highly engaged audiences. So there will be some planning involved in when you’ll want to send your larger campaign and what/when you want to send to your highly engaged campaigns to recover. 

6. What can I do to minimize delays? SMS or MMS? 

   1. Unfortunately, delays are going to be inevitable. A good way to think about this is that sending SMS or MMS during such a high traffic time like BFCM is like traveling during the holidays. Businesses are all trying to send emails out at the same time, just like how everyone is trying to get from point A to point B on the roads. Carriers can only send so many messages in a given time. Just like traffic on the roads, this causes carriers to slow down their sending to accommodate everyone and get their messages out to the intended recipients.

7. I’m still transitioning to Klaviyo, should I be sending emails from both MailChimp and Klaviyo during this transition period?

   1. Yes! If you are not totally warmed in time for big holiday sends and can’t interrupt your sending flow it’s okay to send over a network you’ve been using while you begin sending to your highly engaged. This is a good strategy if you don’t want to pause, and potentially have to restart, the warming process.

8. How can I send to all my customers/contacts on black friday cyber monday?

   1. Although you can send to all contacts in your account, we really don’t recommend this. You really want to segment and target your engaged contacts who are much more likely to spend money with your brand. Think about it this way, reaching out to cold or unengaged contacts is like throwing money at the wall. Chances are they aren’t going to look at your emails if they haven't interacted with them recently. On top of this, constant outreaches to unengaged contacts will lower your sending reputation as it would be a bad look from the inbox provider’s point of view. 

9. When will Klaviyo be able to send emails to t-online.de again?

   1. We’ve been in contact with t-online since, well, this began. We are limited to their rules (link or explain limitations) and should these change, we will be the first to let any and all customers impacted know. For the moment, we are doing our best to enable customers to meet the t-online criteria in order to reach this audience. Until then, we are doing our best to operate within their bounds and support every one as best we can. For anyone still unable to send to t-online, we are continuously advocating for you and will be transparent with any and all updates around this.

10. What times of day are best to send during BFCM?

    1. This really varies from business to business. To find the best send time during the BFCM weekend, I highly recommend running some smart send time tests leading up to the weekend to know what the optimal send times are for your business and contacts. If you have not run this testing or have not received the results for your test, another great sending strategy that I’ve mentioned before is the batch sending method. This will simply send your campaign out in small batches over a specified time frame to alleviate the full need to find a best send time. I always want to advise not to run any of these smart send time tests during BFCM weekend as it would skew the data and results due to the inflated traffic you may be seeing this weekend.

Well, that’s a wrap! Congratulations! Now that you’ve leveled up on deliverability best practices, we’ve included some other helpful resources below to level up other parts of your marketing strategy! We'd love to hear if you learned anything new or excited to try any of these suggested strategies we mentioned. Can't wait to see and hear all you are going to accomplish this BFCM season. Your Community is rooting for you!

As always, stay safe, send safe!

David and Apollonia