How fixing email deliverability issues improved one shop's open rates and sales

If you’ve ever tried to keep plants alive, you know that sporadic and inconsistent watering typically doesn’t work. You can’t drown them one day, over-water the next, leave them to wilt, and expect them to thrive. 

The same goes for how you treat your email list. Erratic emailing can get very ugly very quickly, placing the health of your list and program in peril by spawning email deliverability issues. 

One of our merchants nearly lost a direct line of communication with its best customers this way. We’re telling their story to reinforce what not to do and why.

Luckily, our tale has a happy ending. Over two and a half months, we helped salvage its domain reputation, pulling it out of the depths and into the uppermost echelons of email deliverability.  

The chart doesn’t show the best part. The shop is now raking in more money with half the subscriber count, and placing greater attention on re-engaging customers.

The start of email deliverability problems

Before we spring into storytelling mode, it’s not OK for us to damage a brand’s reputation. Despite our reverence for credibility, we’ll call the Shopify merchant “the shop.” None of what follows is a fabrication. Scout’s honor.  

Our portion of the story began when the shop migrated to Seguno. We completed domain warming — a custom procedure for every new merchant — by sending the first email newsletter on a throttled basis. 

The process puts merchants in good graces with their subscribers’ inbox providers by delivering the email in waves, typically over 24 to 48 hours, to introduce sending volume. It also provides baseline metrics and therefore insights about the shop’s current performance, flagging issues that require attention. 

In this scenario, open rates were good enough to begin sending normally but lackluster enough to earn a spot on our radar. 

Email deliverability troubles surfaced over the next couple of newsletters, thanks to Seguno’s proactive email metric monitoring. Consistently low open rates (2.8%) for Gmail addresses — which account for more than half of the shop’s subscribers — prompted our investigation. 

What went wrong

We went under the hood to diagnose the shop’s domain reputation with Google Postmaster Tools.

Detective hats on, we discovered the reputation was already “low” before Seguno, due to a sporadic email cadence. The shop sent 10 emails one month, four the next, 10 the month after, and one during the last month with its former provider. 

It would be 23 days before another email went out.  

Add dormancy to inconsistency, and it’s a no-fail recipe for tanking your reputation. The shop quickly went from “low” to “bad,” triggering serious email deliverability issues. 

“Any negative change is a call for concern,” says Seguno’s compliance and deliverability analyst Brandon Leverenz. For example, “If you go from high to medium, you're on a downward trajectory. You don't know how fast it’s going, so you want to address it immediately.”

What worsened email deliverability issues 

Jumping back into regular emails after a long absence didn’t help. The shop exacerbated the problem by frequently “remailing” contacts with the same newsletter who didn’t open it the first time.  

Leverenz explains that remails only do harm if you’re already experiencing email deliverability issues. Recipients who ignore the email a second time send negative signals. The engagement ratio appears significantly worse without having the most engaged contacts in the mix. Ultimately, remails can further damage your domain reputation. 

“For a high-performing account, a remail can often return half as much revenue as the initial email,” adds Brian Krug, Seguno’s director of customer success. “But for a poor-performing account, it can reduce inbox placement for your actual engaged customers and limit your revenue potential.”

It’s impossible to predict how much the shop would suffer if it continued bad email practices. But we know that our remediation plan broke and reversed the downward spiral — and more customers are seeing, opening, and acting upon emails.

The intervention 

Climbing out of a bad reputation isn’t for the impatient. Nor will it happen without significant changes. 

Our intervention focused on two prime actions: 

1. Temporarily sequestering the unengaged contacts
2. Stopping the remails 

Task No. 1 is vastly more important to rehabilitating the domain and requires a strategy. 

Each merchant's method of distinguishing between engaged and unengaged subscribers is unique. The ideal formula considers sending habits and products. 

For example, judging engagement for a brand that sells furniture and sends emails twice monthly differs from one that sells shorter life-span products and emails subscribers weekly. 

Fortunately, we could access the shop’s former email provider to export and manipulate open and click-through rate data for opted-in contacts. We deemed an unengaged contact as one that: 

• Subscribed more than 90 days prior
• Hadn’t opened or clicked on an email in the past six months
• Hadn’t purchased in the last year

We excluded all unengaged contacts from receiving email newsletters until the domain reputation improves and stabilizes. About half of the subscriber list was left standing.  

The turnaround  

With the unengaged removed, the shop sent three emails to the remaining engaged contacts spaced one week apart. 

Positive changes emerged with the first restricted send:

• 37% open rate (versus 18% unrestricted)
• 0.42% click rate (versus 0.26%)

The fourth email moved the domain rating from “bad” to “low.” Open rates hit 47% and the click rate climbed to 0.84%.

“When you're in bad and make it up to low, that's awesome,” Leverenz says. “That means something has shifted, and the snowball is growing and getting you where you want to be.”

Activity slightly flattened for the next few emails before the domain reached a “medium” reputation. Email metrics continued to climb thereafter.   

The improvement is evident when comparing pre-intervention and post-intervention activity. Here’s the before (nine newsletters over six weeks) versus the after (10 newsletters over seven weeks):

• Open rates were as low as 5%; they now consistently reach an average of 52%
• Average click rate to the website improved by 56%
• Average sales increased by 79%
• Average order count increased by 45%

The shop is getting into the inbox more and making more money — still with just half the number of subscribers.

The game plan has paid off. The shop’s reputation jumped to “high” 40 days after reaching “medium.” 

Maintaining a stable domain reputation 

Leverenz plans to add the excluded contacts one batch at a time, beginning with those most likely to re-engage or return value first. 

After that, retaining a healthy reputation requires vigilant monitoring and periodic removal of non-engaged contacts.  

We’re sure you want to avert this shop’s troubles. The best way to guard against email deliverability issues is by:

1. Creating good content that your subscribers want to open 
2. Sending emails consistently
3. Taking action or asking for help if you notice performance declines 

“You should focus on converting your new subscribers and not let old, lapsed prospects weigh you down,” Krug recommends. “If they're not going to convert, then be more proactive about managing that list. Most of this is about understanding who is and isn't your customer. ” 

FAQs on preventing email deliverability issues 

When changing email marketing providers, how can merchants avoid deliverability problems?

Clean your subscriber list before moving to the new platform so you start off on the right foot. As mentioned previously, consider what you sell when evaluating the age of a contact and engagement data. But as a general rule, trash any contacts more than 90 days old that have either:

• Never opened or clicked on an email
• Never made a purchase

“They were never your customers to start with,” Krug says. “They never returned value. So all they’re doing at that point is hurting your ability to engage with the other customers.”
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Shopify tip: Create a segment for subscribers added over 180 days ago who haven’t interacted with your emails. They’re good candidates to unsubscribe.  

What actions can cause a drop in domain reputation?

Long delays and erratic sending aren’t the only culprits behind email deliverability issues. Any of the following can precipitate a downgrade: 

• Adding a large quantity of contacts at once (which spikes sending volume). “A lot of people think that by sending to as many contacts as possible, they're spreading their marketing efforts,” Krug says. “But they're less likely to engage. You're harming your email reputation and potentially losing your good contacts.” 
• Mistakenly double or triple sending to the same people. Again, spikes in volume aren’t good. 
• Increasing frequency too quickly. Krug explains, “Some merchants can send twice a day and maintain a high reputation, but they've been doing it consistently. You can't go from being a quarterly sender to sending every single day. You have to ramp things up gradually.” 

Is remailing OK? 

Remailing a newsletter to non-openers isn’t for everyone. We only recommend it if your average open rate is above 35%. 

Follow these guidelines: 

• Change your email subject line and preview text
• Don’t send a remail on the same day as another newsletter 
• Limit remails to your most important messages; use them to enhance larger marketing campaigns

Does Seguno help merchants with email deliverability?

Seguno’s deliverability services include: 

• Assistance with domain authentication upon request
• Domain warming to reintroduce your shop to inbox providers
• Personalized assistance upon request

We offer 1:1 migration support for Shopify Plus stores and brands with 25,000+ subscribers.