I can’t get my emails to go. It’s Labor Day… I NEED THESE EMAILS TO GO OUT, what is the deal?!
Hey
Great question!
It is a common misconception that email delivery is instantly completed after you hit "Send." How long it takes an email to land in a recipient’s inbox depends on a number of factors. These factors include your sending reputation, the list quality and your brands engagement levels, and on the inbox providers themselves.
All of these factors boil down to following best practices and maintaining a good sending behavior. Maintaining a positive sending reputation and the quality of your list are both controllable factors which can help improve the deliverability of your emails. This in turn would also assist in allowing emails to be delivered as soon as possible. You can learn more about good list hygiene and strengthening your sending reputation from the following Help Center articles:
- Guide to List Cleaning
- How to Strengthen Your Sender Reputation
- Guide to Email Deliverability
- Understanding Deliverability Best Practices
- How to Monitor Email Deliverability Performance
The last factor which is dependent on the inbox provider isn’t entirely controllable. Inbox providers will take your emails through a series of security checks to determine if your emails are safe or not as well as determining where to place the emails. Although this is all entirely up to the inbox provider’s discretion on the time it takes for your emails to be placed delivered, it does take into consideration the first two factors of your sending reputation and list/recipient quality.
An analogy I like to use to explain how emails are delivered and how Klaviyo plays a role in this is similar to how a package would be delivered to an apartment complex. Once you’ve dropped off your package at a carrier facility, the actual delivery of the package to the recipient would all depend on the shipping/postal agent and how soon the front desk can put the package in the recipient’s mail slot. In this metaphor, Klaviyo will be the carrier facility that will “send” the email, the shipping and postal agents would be the mail servers that the emails go through. Lastly, the front desk agent would be the inbox provider signing off and placing the email in the recipient’s inbox.
I hope this helps clear up some confusion!
David
I came into the forums just to see if anyone else is having deliverability issues. I have a sale ending in five hours and wondered why my revenue was so poor today. My open rates are far below any I’ve ever seen in my account and individuals who should have received emails are reported as “bounced” in the dashboard. When 90% of your list bounces, it’s probably not the customer email account. This issue applies to an email I sent out last night to an international audience and this morning to an American audience, 25k and 100k respectively, so a big enough data set to wonder.
I too have lost a significant amount of revenue because of these issues. They have very little support if any after hours too which I assume applies to the weekend as well… oh… and holiday… awesome! So a significant amount will turn into a VERY significant amount!
I just sent out another email to the list because that is the only thing I can do tonight. Then that is it. My sale is over.
Deliverability is the reason I came to Klaviyo.
When in doubt, you can always check there for status: https://status.klaviyo.com/
Hopefully that was the case for you.
I scheduled a campaign to send at 9:15 a.m. local US times this morning. It’s now 12 hours later and less than 50% of it has been delivered. My sales and traffic data for the day also tells me these emails haven’t been delivered. This is not just an issue of the analytics not showing correctly.
This is the first day of our Labor Day sale and revenue is about 30% of what it historically is on the first day.
Do we know if emails are actually being sent and are inboxing, and only the backend reporting is down...or are they not actually processing?
Like mentioned above, my revenue projections in Klaviyo and Shopify don’t match, but even the Shopify side is lower than usual.
Also, it’s obviously impossible to send the follow-up email only to customers who haven’t purchased, so you risk getting increased spam complaints by hitting folks who already cashed in the promo.
4+ years of using Klaviyo and it’s the first time I’ve been truly disappointed in them.
Hey
Thanks for bringing up the scheduled event processing maintenance from the Klaviyo Status Page which may have led to some confusion in the campaign’s analytics!
Due to this maintenance, revenue may appear lower than anticipated due in part to how Klaviyo calculated revenue attributed to the email. Klaviyo has a last interaction (open or click) model where the last opened or clicked email prior to a purchase would receive the attribution of the sale. Because of these processing delays, open and clicks may be delayed and thus cause revenue attributed to the email to be lower than expected. No data would be lost due to the maintenance and it would simply be a delay in how the reports are represented. Reporting will appear more accurate once the maintenance has been completed and the data is rerun within Klaviyo’s backend.
If you haven’t already, I would suggest subscribing to Klaviyo’s Status Page to receive updates pertaining to when this maintenance has fully been completed and to receive reports of future server events.
Thanks for being a part of the Klaviyo Community!
David
I understand that the maintenance issue is impacting reporting but I’m looking at actual traffic and revenue metrics (outside of Klaviyo) that tell me emails were not delivered within the usual timeframe. Based on the issues we had on Friday, we scaled back our promotions and only sent 3 of the 6 campaigns we had planned. Needless to say, this had a huge impact on our revenue during the Labor Day Sale.
As a standard disclaimer, I’ve been doing this a very, very long time (yeah, I’m old) and I know my business well enough that I can tell within a short window of time that a promotion has gone live. Taking into account things like the holiday, covid, end of extended unemployment, etc. I can say without a doubt that the emails we sent on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday were not delivered with the usual speed that Klaviyo campaigns are delivered.
If this was not due to the maintenance, I’m curious as to what else could have caused the delay.
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