Klaviyo open rate low compared to previous ESP

Hi @Brentvs 

To add to some of the questions @inboxingmaestro outline, I think the biggest area to focus on is #4, what is your audience definition and focusing on your most engaged audiences. 

While, you’ve steadily increased your sending segment and maintained a good threshold to not increase too large too fast. But the biggest question in my mind given the low open rates, is who are those users? When starting a warm up, you want to target your most active subscribers, ie. Who have opened in the last 30-days or sooner depending on your total list size. If you’ve simply created smaller segments, but not incorporated engagement when making these segments, its possible you 1K, 2K, 3K segments are made largely of subscribers that are less active or inactive as those tend to account for larger percentages of your list. 

For example, I tend to see, on average, brand’s active subscriber segments (depending on the criteria for how they define “Active”), account for 30-40% of your subscribers, whereas less or inactive subscribers account for the majority. 

You should also look at your bounces and unsubscribes for each send, in addition to open rates. If you are seeing bounce rates above 2%, you’ll want to dig into the deliverability portion of your campaigns to see how your top domains are performing. For example, if Gmail accounts for over 50% of your subscriber base and its showing the lowest engagement, you’ll want to adjust your segments to focus primarily on your most engaged users for Gmail domains.

As a next step, I would look at your domain level reporting in the deliverability dashboard of your campaign analytics, and assess how each of your top domains are performing. From there, you’ll likely need to adjust your segments to only target users who have opened in the last 15-30 days and ONLY send to those users from Klaviyo, until you can get your avg. open rates up beyond 30% for your top domains. Only when you are consistently exceeding 30%, can you start to widen your segments to include users who have opened 45-60 days ago, etc.

I hope that helps! 

@In the Inbox 

Hi @Brentvs!

I’m glad you brought this question to the community, so you can get helpful feedback from @inboxingmaestro and @In the Inbox.

To add one more thing to the list, that’s a quick check: Have you verified your sending domain in Klaviyo yet?

This is an important first step when migrating to any new ESP, and it’s an important factor establishing good deliverability for your brand’s emails. Here’s the Klaviyo help doc on how to set this up. Basically, you’re verifying that you own the domain name used to send your emails with, by generating DNS records for Klaviyo.  

You might also consider using this Postmaster tool from Google. It monitors your IP and domain reputation, along with any egregious spam complaints, across all email inboxes hosted by Google. This includes Gmail and GSuite addresses/ emails from any company that uses existing Google infrastructure to host their email addresses. Roughly 80% of all emails are actually tied back to Google under the hood, so this will help you get a useful pulse check on the overall health of your sender reputation. 

Warmly,

Gabrielle

Klaviyo Champion & Marketing Lead at ebusiness pros