How to Fix Your Email Deliverability and Ensure Customers Actually See Your Emails

If your emails aren’t reaching inboxes, they aren’t making you money.

That’s it. Doesn’t matter how sharp the copy is, how pretty the design looks, or how good the offer is. If it’s not landing where people can open it, the campaign is already dead.

For e-commerce brands that depend on email to drive launches, recover abandoned carts, and turn one-time buyers into loyal customers, deliverability isn’t optional. It’s make-or-break.

At ECD, we’ve helped brands bounce back from poor deliverability by fixing what’s happening behind the scenes, from list health to authentication to send logic.

Here’s what that actually means, and the exact steps we use to help brands get seen again.

What Is Email Deliverability?

Email deliverability is the ability of your emails to land in someone’s inbox, not spam, not promotions, and not bounce altogether.

Think of it like your sender reputation. If inbox providers trust you, your messages show up. If they don’t, you’ll get deprioritized, flagged, or filtered, without warning.

What’s a Good Email Delivery Rate?

Aim for 95% or higher.
If your rate drops below 90% or bounce rates are climbing, you’re at risk.

Even worse: you might think your emails are going out fine when they’re actually being blocked or buried. If performance is dropping and your content hasn’t changed, deliverability is the first thing to check.

How Bad Deliverability Hurts You

When deliverability is off, you don’t just lose reach. You lose momentum—and eventually, revenue.

Here’s what that looks like in the real world:

• Emails land in spam, or never make it through
• Opens and clicks drop, even when the offer’s good
• Cart recovery and promo flows stop performing
• List engagement craters
• And email revenue drops—sometimes by 30–50% before anyone realizes why

The good news? Deliverability is fixable.

Here are the technical and strategic steps we use to get e-commerce emails back in the inbox, and keep them there.

Email Deliverability Best Practices

1. Keep Your List Clean
   
   High bounce rates kill reputation.
   If people aren’t opening or clicking, they shouldn’t stay on your active list.
   
   Regularly audit your segments and suppress inactive contacts. If you don’t know where to start, we help clients build filters to isolate low- and no-engagement profiles and clean them safely.
   
   
2. Segment Before You Send
   
   Your full list doesn’t need every campaign.Start with engagement-based segments:
   
   • Last opened (L7D, L30D, L90D)
   • Recent purchasers vs. first-timers
   • Active site visitors
   • VIP tiers or high AOV

    

   Shorter engagement windows = stronger performance and better inbox placement.

    

3.  Authenticate Your Domain (SPF, DKIM, DMARC)
   
   These authentication protocols tell inboxes you’re a legitimate sender.
 If these aren’t set up, inbox providers don’t know you’re legit. It’s like showing up without ID. Klaviyo makes domain authentication simple, and it’s one of the fastest ways to improve trust with inbox providers. 
4. Warm Up New Sending Domains
   
   If you’re launching a new domain or sending from a new IP, go slow.Start with 50–100 engaged users and gradually increase volume. Don’t blast. Don’t panic. Consistency and restraint build reputation faster than frequency.
    
5. Use Sunset Flows Only When Necessary
   
   Sunset flows are a last resort. If your deliverability is solid and your engagement looks healthy, you don’t need this yet. However, if performance is slipping and nothing else is working, removing long-term inactive profiles may be necessary.

Here’s how we define unengaged at ECD—and the filters we use to identify them:

A profile is considered unengaged if:

• They haven’t opened or clicked an email in the last 365 days (excluding Apple Privacy opens)
• They haven’t visited your site, viewed a product, started checkout, or placed an order in the last 12 months
• They haven’t clicked an SMS in the last 12 months
• They haven’t re-subscribed to email marketing in the last 30 days
• They’ve never unsubscribed or marked your email as spam
• They’ve bounced no more than twice
  

We also filter by purchase behavior. Purchasers and non-purchasers get treated differently:

Purchasers: Get more time and a stronger re-engagement effort

Non-purchasers: Are the first to be suppressed if re-engagement fails

Sunset flows aren’t about deleting people. They’re about protecting the people who still want to hear from you and keeping your sender reputation intact.

Sunset flows aren’t about deleting people. They’re about protecting the people who still want to hear from you and keeping your sender reputation intact.

How Klaviyo Helps Deliverability

Klaviyo isn’t just an email tool—it’s built to help you stay out of spam.

Here’s what it gives you (if you use it right):

• Smart Sending: Stops you from over-emailing people who recently got a message
• Engagement-based segmentation: Helps you prioritize people who are actually active
• Exclusion logic: You can build segments labeled [EXCLUDE] to keep risky profiles out of regular sends
• Deliverability-focused analytics: So you can catch problems before they drag down performance
• Simple domain authentication: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC setup is baked in
  

And because Klaviyo syncs directly with platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce, your customer data stays clean and updated—an underrated factor in strong deliverability.

If your platform doesn’t do this, it’s probably holding you back.

How ECD Helps You Fix It

We don’t just craft better emails. We make sure they land.

If your deliverability is dragging down performance, we step in to rebuild what’s broken and protect what’s working. From infrastructure to segmentation, here’s how we help brands stay in the inbox:

• Audit list health to catch bounce risks and low-quality contacts
• Authenticate your domain in Klaviyo (SPF, DKIM, DMARC)
• Set up smart segments + suppression rules that evolve with your list
• Build [EXCLUDE] logic to keep disengaged profiles out of sends
• Design targeted sunset flows when performance really demands it
• Monitor deliverability signals and engagement trends over time