Every deliverability guide covers the right topics: authentication, list hygiene, content. What none of them cover is the order. For a small Shopify or WooCommerce store running automated flows in Klaviyo, sequence matters more than any single tactic. Fix things in the wrong order and you waste weeks improving campaigns that never had a chance.
What are the most effective ways to improve email deliverability for my Shopify store?
Fix domain authentication first. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records prove your sending domain is legitimate. Without them, email providers filter your messages at the ISP level, before any subscriber ever sees your subject line.
A typical store owner spends 10 to 15 hours A/B testing subject lines, adjusting send times, and rewriting preview text, while authentication is missing and the emails are filtered as spam.
The cost is specific. Say you send 10,000 emails per month. Your average order value is $70. If 20% of those emails never reach inboxes, a realistic figure for unauthenticated domains, that’s 2,000 subscribers who never had a chance to convert. At a 2% conversion rate, that’s $2,800 in monthly revenue gone before a single subject line gets read.
The first 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, that’s your deliverability problem diagnosed in a single screen.
A Shopify home goods store doing $85k/month spent six weeks refining abandoned cart subject lines. Open rates stayed stuck at 9%. An audit revealed no DKIM record on their custom sending domain. Klaviyo was authenticated, but the domain was not. After adding the three DNS records Klaviyo surfaces in its domain authentication wizard, open rates climbed to 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 at your domain registrar. GoDaddy, Namecheap, Cloudflare, wherever your domain lives. Each does a distinct job. Together, they prove to inbox providers that emails from your domain are legitimate. Setting them up takes under 30 minutes with Klaviyo’s wizard.
Here is what each one does and why it matters for a store specifically:
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 is tied to your domain. Receiving servers verify it against a public key in your DNS. A match means the email is treated as 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 didn’t know about.
In Klaviyo: 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 to 48 hours for propagation. Verify in Klaviyo’s 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 are collecting data on what is passing and failing. After 30 days, review the aggregate reports. If all your legitimate sending sources are passing, 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 their 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 their Shopify Email and Klaviyo domains to DMARC alignment, and 11 days of goodwill with customers who thought their orders were missing.
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 the past 180 days. For lists under 5,000 contacts, use your ESP’s built-in engagement filters. For larger lists, run addresses through NeverBounce or ZeroBounce before suppressing to separate invalid emails from merely unengaged ones.
List cleaning is not maintenance you can skip. It’s infrastructure. A list with 30% unengaged contacts signals to inbox providers that your emails are unwanted. That signal attaches to your entire sending domain, punishing all campaigns, including those to engaged subscribers.
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. Subject lines should be direct: “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 in Klaviyo and an average open rate of 11%. After running the 180-day suppression, removing 3,900 contacts, their next three campaigns averaged 24% open rates. Klaviyo’s deliverability health score moved from “At Risk” to “Good” within 45 days. Abandoned cart recovery revenue increased 31% over the following two months. The list was smaller. The performance was sharply better.
What spam triggers should you avoid in ecommerce emails?
The spam triggers that hurt ecommerce emails most are phrases you probably use every campaign: “free shipping,” “limited time offer,” “act now,” and any sentence combining those with a percentage-off claim. When you add high image-to-text ratios, spam filters aggregate those signals and route the email to junk.
Transactional emails, order confirmations, shipping notifications, rarely trigger filters. They carry a low commercial intent signal. The subscriber just bought something. The message is expected.
Promotional emails are different. They carry commercial intent by design. When you combine urgency language with discount claims and a high image-to-text ratio in a single email, spam filter algorithms aggregate those signals into a score that routes the email to junk.
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 actual inbox placement across Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, and Apple Mail, real inbox versus spam placement, not a generic deliverability score. Tests start at $5. For a store generating $100k per year in email revenue, that’s minor insurance on a major revenue channel.
One tactical note specific to automated flows: keep your transactional and promotional sends in separate segments. In Klaviyo, transactional flows, order confirmation, shipping update, post-purchase, should reach your full customer base regardless of engagement history. Promotional campaigns should go only to your engaged segment. Mixing them degrades the sender reputation your high-engagement transactional emails are building.
What should you realistically expect in the first 30 days?
Fix authentication in week one and inbox placement rate typically rises 15 to 20 percentage points within 10 days. Clean your list in week two and open rates reflect the change on the next send. Both changes together, on a domain that had neither, produce open rates in the 25, 35% range for abandoned cart and post-purchase flows within 30 days.
These are baseline numbers for properly authenticated, clean lists. If you’re below 15% open rates and your flows have been live more than 60 days, you’re dealing with 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.
One thing that does not move the needle in 30 days: IP warming schedules. IP warming matters when you are migrating to a dedicated IP or switching ESPs. For a store that has been sending from the same Klaviyo account for more than 90 days, IP reputation is already established. Authentication and list hygiene produce faster results for that scenario.
You may have been working on the wrong layer. Subject line testing is worth doing. It produces real gains. But only after your emails are consistently reaching inboxes. The DNS records take 30 minutes to fix. The list suppression takes an afternoon. Do both before your next send, then measure. The open rates will tell you immediately whether the problem was placement or content, and for stores sitting below 12%, it was placement the entire time.
