Your abandoned cart flow is live. You built your post-purchase sequence. If open rates sit below 12%, the problem isn’t your subject lines.
Your emails aren’t reaching inboxes. Knowing how to improve ecommerce email deliverability starts one layer below subject lines: DNS records and list hygiene.
Every deliverability guide covers the right topics: authentication, list hygiene, content. None of them cover the order. For a Shopify or WooCommerce store running Klaviyo flows, sequence matters more than any single tactic.
Fix things in the wrong order and you waste weeks on campaigns that never had a chance.
What are the most effective ways to improve email deliverability for my Shopify store?
The most effective first move is fixing domain authentication before touching anything else. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records tell inbox providers that your domain is legitimate. Without them, providers filter your emails at the ISP level — before any subscriber ever sees your subject line.
Most store owners spend their first 10–15 hours on the wrong layer.
They A/B test subject lines. They adjust send times. They rewrite preview text.
Meanwhile, Gmail and Outlook route those emails to spam. The sending domain looks like a phishing attempt to their filters. Not a single subject line gets read.
The cost is specific. Send 10,000 emails per month at a $70 average order value. Unauthenticated domains commonly miss 20% of inboxes — 2,000 subscribers who can’t convert.
At a 2% conversion rate, that’s $2,800 in monthly revenue. Gone before a single subject line gets read.
The 20% move: run your sending domain through mail-tester.com right now. The full test takes four minutes. If SPF, DKIM, or DMARC show as missing or misconfigured, your deliverability problem is diagnosed in one screen.
A Shopify home goods store doing $85k/month spent six weeks refining abandoned cart subject lines. Open rates stayed at 9%. Their custom sending domain had no DKIM record — Klaviyo was authenticated, the domain was not.
They added the three DNS records Klaviyo surfaces in its domain authentication wizard. Open rates hit 27% within three weeks. No copy changed.
How do I set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records for my ecommerce domain?
SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are three DNS records. You add them at your domain registrar — GoDaddy, Namecheap, Cloudflare. Each one does a distinct job.
Together, they prove to inbox providers that emails from your domain are legitimate.
SPF authorizes specific sending services to send on behalf of your domain. If you send from Klaviyo, your SPF record includes Klaviyo’s mail servers. Without it, Gmail treats your email as potentially forged.
DKIM attaches a cryptographic signature to every outbound email. The signature ties to your domain. Receiving servers verify it against a public key in your DNS.
A match tells the receiving server the email is authentic.
DMARC tells receiving servers what to do when SPF or DKIM fails. It also sends you aggregate reports. Those reports show who is sending from your domain — including services you did not know about.
The setup in Klaviyo takes under 30 minutes. Go to Account → Settings → Email → Sending Domains → Add Domain. Klaviyo generates the exact SPF and DKIM values.
Copy those into your DNS provider. Wait 24–48 hours for propagation. Verify in Klaviyo’s sending domain dashboard.
For DMARC, add this record as a starting point: v=DMARC1; p=none; rua=mailto:reports@yourdomain.com
The p=none policy means no enforcement yet. You collect data on what passes and fails. After 30 days, review the aggregate reports.
If all legitimate sending sources pass, move to p=quarantine.
Do not go straight to p=reject. One WooCommerce apparel brand doing $220k/year set DMARC to p=reject before confirming transactional emails were DKIM-signed. Order confirmations and shipping notifications stopped delivering for 11 days.
Repeat purchase revenue dropped $4,100 that month. The fix required adding Shopify Email and Klaviyo to DMARC alignment. Customers assumed their orders were lost.
Total setup time, following Klaviyo’s wizard: under 30 minutes.
How often should you clean your email list to maintain good deliverability?
Clean your list every 90 days at minimum. Remove subscribers who have not opened or clicked in 180 days. For lists under 5,000, use your ESP’s built-in engagement filters.
For larger lists, run addresses through NeverBounce or ZeroBounce first. That separates invalid emails from unengaged ones before you suppress.
Most store owners treat list cleaning as optional maintenance. It is not optional. It is infrastructure.
A list with 30% unengaged contacts sends a clear signal to inbox providers: these emails are not wanted. That signal attaches to your entire sending domain — not just the campaign that triggered it. Your engaged subscribers suffer the same placement penalty as your dead weight.
In Klaviyo, build this suppression segment:
- Has not opened email in the last 180 days
- Has not clicked email in the last 180 days
- Subscribed at least 30 days ago
Suppress that segment before your next send. Do not delete the contacts — suppressed records preserve your historical data but do not count toward your active sending pool.
If the segment is larger than 20% of your active list, do not suppress everyone at once. Run a two-email re-engagement sequence first, seven days apart. Use direct subject lines: "Still want to hear from us?" and "Last chance to stay on the list."
Suppress everyone who does not open or click either email.
A Shopify skincare store doing $55k/month had 11,200 subscribers and an 11% average open rate. The 180-day suppression removed 3,900 contacts. Their next three campaigns averaged 24% open rates.
Klaviyo’s deliverability score moved from "At Risk" to "Good" within 45 days. Abandoned cart recovery revenue rose 31% over the following two months. Smaller list, sharply better performance.
What spam triggers should you avoid in ecommerce emails?
The highest-risk spam triggers are not the obvious ones. You probably use them in every campaign. Phrases like "free shipping," "limited time offer," and "act now" are the problem.
Combine any of those with a percentage-off claim in the same email and you flag spam filters.
Transactional emails rarely trigger filters. Order confirmations and shipping notifications carry low commercial intent. The subscriber just bought something — the message is expected.
Promotional emails carry commercial intent by design. Spam filters treat them differently. They aggregate urgency language, discount claims, and image-heavy layouts into a junk-routing score.
Specific combinations to avoid in ecommerce campaigns:
- "Free shipping" + "X% off" + any time-pressure phrase in the same email
- Image-only emails with less than 60% text content
- More than one emoji in a subject line
- Emails with no plain-text version
- Links that pass through a URL shortener before your domain
The diagnostic step takes five minutes and costs almost nothing. Before a live send, push the campaign through GlockApps or Mail-Tester. GlockApps shows inbox versus spam placement across Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, and Apple Mail — not a deliverability score, actual placement.
Tests start at $5. For a store generating $100k/year in email revenue, that is cheap insurance.
Keep transactional and promotional sends in separate Klaviyo segments. Transactional flows — order confirmation, shipping update, post-purchase — go to your full customer base regardless of engagement history. Promotional campaigns go only to your engaged segment.
Mixing them degrades the sender reputation your transactional emails are building.
What should you realistically expect in the first 30 days?
Fix authentication in week one and inbox placement typically rises 15–20 points within 10 days. Clean your list in week two and open rates reflect the change on the next send. Both together produce open rates of 25–35% for abandoned cart and post-purchase flows within 30 days.
These are not aspirational numbers. They are the baseline for authenticated, clean email.
If you are below 15% open rates and your flows have been live for 60 days, you have a placement problem. Not an engagement problem.
The sequence matters:
Week 1: Run mail-tester.com and MXToolbox. Add missing SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records. Verify propagation in Klaviyo’s sending domain dashboard.
Week 2: Build your 180-day suppression segment. For lists over 5,000, run ZeroBounce first to catch invalid addresses before suppressing. Send the two-email re-engagement sequence to anyone in the gray zone.
Week 3: Test your highest-revenue flows through GlockApps before reactivating them. Abandoned cart, post-purchase, and win-back sequences are where the revenue is. Confirm each one lands in the inbox across the major clients before turning them on.
Week 4: Send your first campaign to the cleaned, authenticated list. Track open rate, click rate, and unsubscribe rate by segment. Check Klaviyo’s deliverability dashboard for inbox placement trend over the prior seven days.
IP warming schedules don’t move the needle in 30 days for most stores. IP warming matters when you migrate to a dedicated IP or switch ESPs. If you’ve been sending from the same Klaviyo account for 90+ days, IP reputation is already established.
Authentication and list hygiene produce faster results for that scenario.
You have been optimizing the wrong layer. Subject line testing produces real gains — but only after your emails consistently reach inboxes. The DNS records take 30 minutes.
The list suppression takes an afternoon. Do both before your next send, then measure. Open rates tell you immediately whether the problem is placement or content.
For most stores below 12%, it was placement the entire time.
