Community Manager

Deliverability AMA: your BFCM success starts in the Inbox

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
July 17, 2025
26 replies
1732 views

Welcome to our Deliverability AMA!

Struggling to hit the inbox? Wondering why your open rates have dipped, or what a spam trap even is? You’re in the right place.

From July 21–28, 2 of our deliverability experts, @Shareen and @Hugues, are here to answer all your questions, big or small. Whether you’re troubleshooting a drop in engagement or trying to decode sender reputation, we’re ready to help.

Drop your questions in this thread any time during the AMA window, and we’ll respond by Monday, July 28.

Let’s get your emails where they belong: the inbox.

Ask away! 👇

This AMA is now closed - feel free to ask any questions to the general Community by clicking on the “New Post” button in the upper right corner.

This topic has been closed for replies.

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M

MAUJH

Contributor I

Is it true that bringing over designed emails from Canva (vs building in klaviyo) impacts deliverability?
What are the ideal image sizes for graphics (building in Klaviyo)?
Are there industry standards for deliverability rates (fashion and ecommerce)?

B

Bartok Team

Contributor I

Hello,
Our team would like to know, what are the most common reasons for low open rates in Klaviyo, and how can I determine which apply to my account?

Thank you!

R

ren_lipari

Contributor I

Hi,

Lately we’ve noticed a lot of our emails are going to spam - especially outlook. When we send it via another inbox, like our customer service mailbox for example, we noticed a significant increase in responses. (This specific example is from an event newsletter). Is there anything we can do to stopped being flagged as spam ? We did not had this issue before, and only noticed it around April this year.

H

Hugues

Klaviyo Employee

Hi team,

I’m part of a digital marketing agency that manages several client accounts using Klaviyo, and I had a question around best practices when it comes to using live text versus images in eDMs.

We work with several health and wellness brands, so creating visually appealing, design-led emails is a big focus for us. We’re exploring the idea of designing the full eDM in tools like Adobe or Canva, slicing it for loading purposes, and uploading it as images into Klaviyo. This gives us much more creative freedom than building with live text alone, which we’ve found to be a bit more limiting from a design perspective.

That said, we’re unsure if this approach could be negatively affecting deliverability, accessibility, or overall user experience. We're also not clear on what the actual benefits of using live text are (if any) in comparison to image-based designs.

We’d really appreciate any insights, recommendations, or resources you can share to help guide our decision.

Thanks,

Jenna :)

Hello @Jenna Lowe,

We recommend that images make up no more than 40% of your template, with real text accounting for 60-70%.

Templates made up almost entirely of images can hurt your deliverability, as this raises red flags with spam filters that view it as a common spam tactic.

H

Hugues

Klaviyo Employee

Hi there! Our deliverability score is 81 (considered good), however all our customers are noticing our emails ending up in junk, spam, or promotions tab. Why is this considered good deliverability?

We’ve noticed other skincare brands, Rhode being a great example, who have figured out a way to structure their emails to end up in the primary inbox — not spam, junk, or the promotions tab. What are your recommendations for this?

Hello @EmersonP,

Noticing that some of your emails are landing in the spam folder doesn’t mean that all of your emails are ending up there. Your sender reputation can vary between inbox providers, you might have a great deliverability with one and a less engaged audience with another, which can cause your sender reputation to drop on that platform.

Additionally, landing in the Promotions tab is not considered a negative outcome, as it’s still part of the inbox.
This is where users expect to find promotional content. They are less likely to unsubscribe or mark the email as spam compared to when it shows up in the Primary tab unexpectedly.
In fact, users actively open the Promotions tab looking for this type of content, which often leads to better engagement.

H

Hugues

Klaviyo Employee

Our emails got spoofed -- and it hurt us big time. We tightened up our DNS, but now most of our own emails are going to spam or quarantine. How can we rebuild our credibility and get those emails back in inboxes?

Hello @CWURM,

I would suggest making sure your DMARC policy is correctly configured and that your sending domain aligns properly with your sender address.
Landing in spam in a common issue when moving to a stricter DMARC policy if it’s not implemented correctly.

Feel free to create a ticket with our support team and we’ll be happy to review this for you.

Once you’ve confirmed there are no misconfigurations, start a new warming period by targeting only your most engaged users, gradually increasing the engament window. This should help optimise your reactivity and rebuild your sender reputation with inbox providers.

H

Hugues

Klaviyo Employee

I want to improve my deliverability score. What are the best ways to do that? Are there instructions how to do it successfully? Thank you!

Hello @lheritagefinejewelry,

The best ways to improve your deliverability are to keep your list clean, regularly suppress disengaged users, enable double op-in during registration to prevent hard bounces and spam traps from entering your lists, and tighten the engagement window of the users you’re targeting, making sure you’re reaching out to profiles that have recently interacted with your emails.

This will help increase your sender reputation with inbox providers, who will in turn place a greater share of your sendings in the inbox folder.

H

Hugues

Klaviyo Employee

I inherited a bad email list of scraped emails that never got explicit permission to send marketing emails. This has resulted in a large number of suppressed profiles, basically the entire list making it onto a never engaged segment, horrible deliverablity rates, domain bounces and more. I have set up flows and forms to encourage readers to sign up for mailing list but so far only one person has signed up. What can I do to fix any of this?

Hello @Tara E.,

The best way to fix this issue is to suppress all the profiles from that list and only target users who have directly consented to receive your marketing emails.

Please note that using a third-party list of profiles who haven’t provided their direct consent is prohibited on our platform and goes against Klaviyo’s Acceptable Use Policy.

https://www.klaviyo.com/legal/acceptable-use-policy

S

Shareen

Klaviyo Employee

Hi. My brand’s deliverability score in Klaviyo usually sits in the Good or Excellent range. Anecdotally, though, I’ve been hearing from some individual and business customers that our emails have been ending up in their Junk Mail folder. I’m specifically talking about transactional or business correspondence emails, but I assume that the same rules apply for these types of emails as they do to newsletters. Generally speaking, I don’t think I have a problem when it comes to newsletter deliverability, but then again, I don’t know how many of those are also in junk mail folders.

My question: If my deliverability score is Good or Excellent already, what else can I be troubleshooting to solve this issue.

Thank you!

Hello @kuishinbo :) Thanks for your message. It’s great to hear that your Klaviyo deliverability score is consistently Good or Excellent, that is a strong indicator overall. However I understand your concern about some business and transactional emails ending up in junk mail folders.

Even with a solid sender reputation, some emails may end up being marked as spam due to the following:

Business Email Filtering
Even well configured emails can sometimes land in Junk due to recipient’s specific filters or corporate email firewalls. I would recommend encouraging these contacts to mark your emails as “Not Junk” this helps improve future delivery.

Transactional Email Content
Overly promotional language, excessive links or images in transactional emails can trigger spam filters. You can use our transactional email best practices guide to review and optimise your transactional emails.

H

Hugues

Klaviyo Employee

Hi! I’d really appreciate your insight on this.

Our email deliverability score is currently quite low, and Klaviyo suggests we use AI repair plan to skip sending to users who haven’t interacted with us in the last 30 days. The issue is, if we follow that, we’re left with a very small segment to send to.

We’ve tried the AI repair plan before, and it actually did help improve our score at the time. But recently, our deliverability has dropped again, and I’m unsure what the best approach is going forward.

The dilemma is:

When we send to the full list, our deliverability takes a hit — but we consistently see sales.

When we only send to engaged subscribers, our deliverability improves — but we see no revenue.

Would you recommend using the AI repair plan again and focusing only on the engaged segment for a while, even if that means sacrificing short-term revenue? Or is there a smarter way to balance both deliverability and sales?

Thanks in advance!

Hello @Eddie Sun,

Yes, i would recommend focusing on your engaged segment and gradually ramping up your volume.
Avoid doubling your volume from a week to the next, instead increase it by a maximum of 20% week over week.

If you notice your metrics starting to drop, slow down and keep your volume stable for a longer period.

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