Case study · DTC · deliverability
Getting a brand back into Gmail, in 60 days.
A DTC brand's Klaviyo deliverability score had fallen to an all-time low of 65 during its most important selling season. By sending less and rebuilding from the most engaged subscribers outward, we took it to 80 in 60 days, and clicks and revenue followed.
Retention & deliverability lead, via RevAudit.ai · 60-day recovery
- Klaviyo deliverability score
- 65 → 80
- Click rate vs. baseline
- +73.9%
- Attributed revenue vs. baseline
- +40.3%
The situation
Where Gmail deliverability rescue was
Email was landing in spam, click rates had collapsed, and Gmail, where the brand's most valuable customers read their email, had downgraded the sender's reputation. Even engaged subscribers were missing messages.
The cause was years of sending to people who hadn't opened in months. Fixing it meant accepting a short-term dip in traffic and revenue to rebuild the channel properly.
The approach
What I did
01
Build the engaged core
Started sending only to people who had opened or clicked in the last 5 days, then widened to 10, 15 and 30 days once each group cleared open, click and spam benchmarks. Tracked results separately for Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook and Apple.
02
Suppress the unengaged
Built cold (16–60 days), dormant (61–180 days) and long-inactive (180+ days) groups and left them out of every send. Set up Google Postmaster Tools to check domain reputation daily.
03
Bring people back slowly
Reintroduced suppressed subscribers in batches of 15–20%, three to five days apart, leading with plain-text founder emails and best-seller roundups.
04
Hold when the numbers dip
If any send fell below the benchmarks, we stopped widening the audience until reputation settled, and kept going until the score passed the target of 75.
The results
What changed
When deliverability drops, most brands send more. The fix is the opposite: send less, protect your reputation, and grow back from the people who want to hear from you.
- Klaviyo deliverability score from 65 to 80, past the 75 target, in 60 days
- Click rate up 73.9% and spam complaints down 43.5% vs. baseline
- Attributed revenue up 40.3% vs. baseline, with open rate up 2.6%
- 26K new profiles added in the recovery window, up from 12K the month before, while the list was being cleaned
- Revenue spikes in Shopify on every send, even though up to half of that traffic showed no attributed source
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Attribution & GMV goals
Attribution changed. We kept hitting GMV goals.
Read the case study →
Next step
Find the leak.
Fix the flow.
Keep the customer.
Book a 30-minute call. Bring your questions or your Klaviyo login. You'll leave with at least two things worth fixing, whether we work together or not.
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