The Klaviyo deliverability and compliance team is here to ensure that your messages are delivered to your recipients’ inboxes. Therefore we’re excited to host our AMA (Ask Me Anything). Your questions and our answers are shared below. Let us know in the thread what else we can help with!
- How do I resend an email to customers without impacting my sending reputation
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.
The best way to reduce the impact to your sender reputation is to be prepared early on and have a repair plan in place for either during or after BFCM weekend.
- I just started and set up a branded sending domain, is there any faster way to warm my new sending domain?
Sending while using a branded sending domain is an inboxing requirement. Warming this branded sending domain 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. This warming period will also help inbox providers acclimate to your new sending infrastructure if you’ve recently migrated to Klaviyo.
As long as you are sending consistently and to an engaged audience (opens and clicks) with minimal negative engagements (bounces, unsubscribes, and spam complaints) 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 - especially if you aren’t contacting an engaged audience and/or encounter elevated negative engagements. It is important to note that during this warmup time, if you discover any significant changes in engagement rates, STOP. Re-evaluate what might have changed and alter your warmup strategy accordingly. If you spent more than a few days paused, revert back a few days on the warmup plan to account for said pause, and continue warming from there.
- How do I know if someone is highly engaged versus low engaged?
The easiest way to see if contacts are engaged or not is if they’ve interacted with your emails such as opening or clicking on your emails. 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.
It’s also important to exclude machine/bot activity in your segments with definitions such as “What someone has or has not done, Person has Opened Email…Where Apple Privacy Open is True/False” and “What someone has or has not done, Person has Clicked Email…Where Bot Click is True/False”. Inbox providers do not consider machine/bot activity as true engagement. This means without excluding them from your segments, you may inadvertently be targeting machine/bot profiles which would be perceived as outreaching to an unengaged recipient - harming your sender reputation.
If you haven’t already, it’s also a great idea to build out a Never Engaged (email) segment detailed in our How to create a never engaged segment Help Center article. This can be done by either manually building it out or using the option within the Action Center in your account’s deliverability tab.
- Do bounced emails affect my deliverability?
Love this question! It really depends on the bounce type of your emails! Soft bounces have less impact on your sending reputation as compared to hard bounces, though they can eventually contribute to a poor domain reputation over time.. 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.
Although soft bounces will typically have less of an impact to your sender reputation as compared to hard bounces, a consistent stream of elevated soft bounces will. From an inbox provider’s perspective, this is seen as a sender who does not pay attention to their performance and/or is not taking action to correct the issue. Because of this, it’s best to identify bounces early on to stop them before they become a major issue.
- How does increasing my sending volume during BFCM impact my deliverability? Are there any recommendations for this?
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.
To help recover your sender reputation, it’s best practice to send two to three campaigns following a larger audience sent to only your highly engaged audiences. This will entail some planning involved to account for both the timing and content of the emails you want to send to both your larger audience along with your highly engaged audience members for recovery.
On the topic of planning, you’ll also want to ramp up your audience volume over a longer period of time rather than immediately outreach to a larger volume than what you typically send. Meaning, if you had an audience size/volume you want to target of 100,000 profiles, but your typical campaign send is about 10,000 profiles, you’ll want to slowly increase your campaign size rather than jump right to the 100,000 volume.
You can do this by starting off with an engaged audience and slowly increasing your campaign volume between 25 to 50% each time. For example, your first campaign will be 5,000 recipients, followed by your second campaign with a 25% increase in volume to be 6,250. Your third campaign will then be another 25% of that to 7,815, etc. Depending on the difference between your engaged audience size and your intended sending volume, this may take some time. For this reason it’s best to start warming your lists and send volumes starting as early as September.
- What can I do to minimize delays? SMS or MMS?
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.
- I’m still transitioning to Klaviyo, should I be sending emails from both MailChimp and Klaviyo during this transition period?
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.
The key is to ensure that both platforms have a branded sending domain setup whose subdomains are not conflicting with one another. In other words, use a unique branded sending subdomain for each platform you are sending emails out from - this includes your ecommerce platform too!
- How can I send to all my customers/contacts on black friday cyber monday?
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 interact with your emails and 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.
- When will Klaviyo be able to send emails to t-online.de again?
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.
- What times of day are best to send during BFCM?
This really varies from business to business. To find the best send time during the BFCM weekend, we 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 the 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.
