Your sender reputation is the single most important factor determining whether your emails reach the inbox. For ecommerce brands, a damaged sender reputation means your abandoned cart flows, welcome series, and campaigns are all being filtered before your customers ever see them — costing you revenue every day. This guide covers how sender reputation works and the specific steps to build and protect it in Klaviyo.

What is Sender Reputation for Ecommerce Email?

Inbox providers like Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook assign a reputation score to your sending domain based on your sending behaviour over time. High engagement improves your reputation. Low engagement, high bounce rates, and spam complaints damage it. In Klaviyo, your reputation is tied to your sending domain — which is why setting up a dedicated sending domain is the first thing we do for every new Eledia client.

Warming Up Your Domain for Klaviyo Ecommerce Sends

If you're starting with a new sending domain, warm it up gradually. Start by sending to your most engaged subscribers (opened in the last 30 days) and expand to less engaged segments over 4–6 weeks. Klaviyo's smart sending features help automate this process.

Understanding and Maintaining Your Sender Reputation

Everyone that has an email address also has a sender reputation. This gives each inbox provider an idea of who you are, and whether you’re a trustworthy sender or not. Your reputation decides where your email ends up – a good reputation will ensure that your email ends up in the inbox, whereas if you’ve got a bad sender reputation your email will end up in the spam folder.

This directly impacts the results of your email marketing. Just ask yourself this: How often do you open your spam emails? Probably way less than your regular inbox. For this reason, it is crucial to maintain a high sender reputation, which will then lead to a higher open rate and click rate.

Through reading this article, you’ll be able to make sure to always maintain a healthy sending reputation, thus increasing your conversions.

Spam Traps

There are 3 types of spam traps which you need to look out for. These spam traps are used by inbox providers to make sure you adhere to good practices. If you send emails to these traps, then it is a strong indication that you’ve either purchased a contact list or you’re not cleaning the list you’re using. The different types are:

Pristine

These are public emails, which are hidden in a way that most users wouldn’t find them. These emails can usually only be found if you’ve scraped a website, hence their purpose is to identify bad senders.

Recycled

An email that has been used by a real person at one point in time but has been turned into a spam trap which will hard bounce any email that is sent to it. If you keep sending messages although they were hard bounced, then your emails will be forwarded to spam.

Invalid Address

These are simply addresses that don’t exist or are not valid due to typos. To avoid this trap, use double opt-in to make sure that your list is verified, and your audience has put in their correct information.

Warming Up Your Email Account

The concept of warming your email is crucial to make sure you have a healthy and trusting domain. In essence, it is a period where you send a lower volume of emails to prove to inbox providers that you are a trustworthy sender, which leads to your emails landing in the inbox and not the spam folder.

There are different scenarios where you have to go through a warming-up period of roughly 30 days, such as:

• When you start sending from a new ESP

• You’ve set up a new sending domain

• You’ve set up a new IP address

Should you go through any of these changes, make sure to track your open rates and click rates. These metrics are crucial to let you know the health of your email domain, and whether your recipients are interested in the content you’re sending them.

One way to make sure that you warm up your audience correctly when you switch to another ESP is by segmenting your audience based on engagement in the past 30, 60, and 90 days. Since you have sent out emails in the past, you already have the necessary data to target your most interested audience, hence speeding up the warming-up process.

Furthermore, you can use these segments to plan your email content calendar, which will increase your open rates and conversion rates.

Note: Keep in mind to ignore the open rates from the Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) to make sure your metrics are as accurate as possible.

Have a Main List and Keep It Clean

To segment your audience you need to have a main list with all of your contacts. This list should be centralized and hold all your contact information to avoid duplicates and make sure that you can personalize correctly.

However, it is important that your list is regularly cleaned, removing all your recipients who aren’t actively engaging with your content. This can be done through a sunset flow, which is a last sequence of emails you send to an uninterested segment of your audience to potentially win them back or remove them from your list if they still don’t show any interest.

Although the sunset flow will have generally lower metrics compared to other flows, it will allow you to achieve better deliverability, due to removing the audience that is not interested in the content of your brand, as well as lowering your cost, due to a smaller list saved and lower volume of emails you will send out.

This is all you need to know to make sure you have a good sender reputation. Should you still have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us at:

info@eledia.co