Alice in Deliverabilityland 🐰

Yo! Paperboy here 🗞️ Read this email and guess if it was written by AI. I’ll tell you at the end (you might be surprised).

Today’s Golden Nugget: Getting growth ideas directly from customers

• Pick up the phone and call people right after they purchase or abandon checkout. Most founders are too nervous to do this (but not you).

• Send a quarterly incentivized survey.

• Send a campaign “Give us ideas for summer drops” to your customers. This just crushed for a client.

• Send a physical letter from the founder in each order. Tell customers your story and ask them to text or email you their feedback.

• Create a Facebook group, WhatsApp chat, etc. with your super fans. Share it in the post-purchase email flow. Credit to Sam from Humankind candles who is really good at this - it’s literally become a channel for her.

• Add “did you like this email?” to the bottom of all your emails.

• Listen to this dtc podcast episode, it’s only 11 min long + Nate is great (I’m not affiliated).

Relevant quote: "If there's one reason we have done better than our peers in the Internet space over the last six years, it is because we have focused like a laser on customer experience." -Jeff Bezos

Today’s Issue: Deliverability rabbit hole

Over the last few weeks I felt like Alice in Deliverabilityland.

You probably don’t care about all that happened down there - just trust me it was some nerdy shit.

My biggest takeaway? Nobody is properly addressing deliverability for Klaviyo.

The deliverability dashboard is practically useless. Brands have no idea if their segments are segmenting out bad actors. How to ward off list bombing? Identify bot clicks? I could go on.

It’s truly one of those “you don’t know what you don’t know” situations for Klaviyo right now.

“Deliverability this deliverability that. Who cares Paperboy?”

You should for two BIG reasons:

1. Bad deliverability can lead to your emails ending up in spam. I see it happen all the time to reputable brands. That next drop you have planned? Nobody will see it if your emails are in the junk folder.

2. Fake emails added to your emails hurt deliverability AND cost you more on your Klaviyo bill.

The reality is brands are so focused scaling ads and managing frenzies like the tariffs, that nobody really stops to learn the intricacies of deliverability. And that’s ok. That’s why you read Paperboy.

The following are all issues I’ve identified and my best solutions for now to deliverability problems you may or may not have thought about. Forward this to your retention manager and your IT guy. Have a meeting to talk about each of these sections.

Shopify checkout list bombs

Sometimes your Shopify checkout or popup will get bombarded with fake emails. This happens to ~30% of brands we work with.

What to do when it happens:

• Use double opt-in (annoying)

• Use captcha on your popup form (a little annoying)

• Use an email validation tool like Webbula to check every email as it comes in (more below)

I set up a cool flow that scores every new email, and flags fake emails so that I auto delete them in my abandon checkout flow. You can set it up through Zapier (a little pricier for big brands) or set up your own bot to do it (I did this with AWS lambda).

If you want to learn more about my AWS lambda setup email me - I might even do a future webinar on it. It’s a little bit DIY so don’t want to cover it too deep for the sake of being concise.

Also, some popup software (like Alia) have partnerships with SaaS vendors to support email validation for new emails.

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Webbula financially, but I did get a ton of support from their team in setting up my solution. They literally had 5 people join my initial call to make sure the setup was perfect.

Setting up an eclipse flow

As you grow you’ll start to get discount shoppers and gift buyers who only subscribe to your email to see if they can save a quick buck. They have no intention of ever reading your emails and likely will never be back again. And that’s ok.

The solution: An eclipse flow.

If someone subscribed to your email flow, but then opened none of the emails, didn’t purchase, didn’t click, etc. you want to get them off your list ASAP. They are hurting deliverability.

Set up your welcome flow so that 20 days after it initially started, if the user took no action and provided 0 engagement, you automatically stop emailing them. You can either:

1. Tag them with an inactive property that puts them into an unengaged segment, then do a list cleaning quarterly

2. Set up a webhook that pings the Klaviyo API to auto-unsubscribe (advanced)

Setting up a sunset flow

All good things come to an end. People eventually stop reading your emails. That’s ok. But what’s not ok is continuing to email people when they have clearly moved on.

The solution: Set up an engagement segment that checks if someone has received 10+ emails in the last 360 days, purchased 0 times, clicked 0 times and visited the site 0 times. Play around with the variables. Clean out this list quarterly.

Most of the time I leave out opens because of how common bot opens are these days (Gmail & Apple often tell Klaviyo an email is opened even if it never was).

Figuring out what is a real and fake click

Gmail, yahoo, Hotmail and other inbox providers use bots to open and click your links to validate if they are safe or not. There are also some bad actors who will spam click your links for other reasons.

This inflates clicks and opens for most brands. If you’re small, you won’t really notice the impact. If you’re bigger, you should consider using a click validation tool.

There is software out there that can tell you in real-time when someone clicks on your link whether it was a bot or spam click (with a certain degree of certainty). Klaviyo has this built in but… it’s not very good. If your brand is at scale you should be leveraging a more advanced 3rd party.

I won’t share any links because I haven’t tested a lot of software here yet. There are companies that do this though (reply to me if you’ve had an experience with this).

Monitoring sending health

Over time as your list grows and you email more and more people you want to be monitoring your sending health.

There are a few things to monitor:

• Inbox placement - what % of sends go to spam, promo tab or main inbox

• DMARC & other technical things - any issues with your email authentication/sending infrastructure

• Open & spam rates - how healthy your list is

Options to monitor:

• Setup Google Postmaster (it’s free) to monitor the technical pieces. Yahoo also has their own version but don’t set it up unless you’re bigger (100k+ list).

• Use an inbox placement analytics app (can be pricey) or simply check your emails on new people’s phones who aren’t already on your list

• Ask your core customers when you talk to them if they see your emails in the main inbox, the promo tab or spam

Branded sending domain

Your emails need to come from your own domain. Klaviyo basically forces you to do this today.

Most of my readers probably have this default set up. If not click this link and follow the steps.

Auditing a new list (or a giveaway list)

Use a tool like Webbula to upload and check the list. It’s cheaper than you think. The amount of fake emails you discover and delete will save you on monthly Klaviyo billing which is a nice benefit. If you have a lot of fake emails from past giveaways, the Klaviyo savings will probably pay for the cost of a list clean.

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Webbula but I’m using their service.

Proper segmentation

As always, you should try to curb deliverability issues by only sending to segments that are likely to convert or purchase.

Figure out what the correct segments are for your brand to be sending to, and avoid blasting your full list frequently as that is the quickest way to end up in deliverability jail.

Consultants

There are some really smart deliverability people out there. From what I’ve seen, most of them have stints working with very large companies (think IBM, Apple, Microsoft, etc.) and can very rapidly dissect deliverability issues.

If you’re a bigger brand it might be worth it to proactively set up a relationship with one, and ask them to do a quarterly audit and give you their emergency rates. I can suggest a couple people I’ve already worked with if needed.

So was this email written with AI?

Nope!

Memes of the Week

That’s all for now,
Paperboy 🗞

p.s. Did you like the newsletter? Hate it? Reply and tell me why! I read and reply to every message.

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