Why Klaviyo emails land in Promotions or spam

Why Klaviyo emails go to Promotions or spam

Gmail sorts mail into tabs based on how a message looks and how each person has treated your mail before. A marketing email with a big header image, a grid of products and a discount code reads as promotional, so it goes to Promotions. Klaviyo’s help centre says much the same: the more personal a message looks, the more likely it is to land in Primary.

Spam is a reputation decision. Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo look at your sending domain’s history, whether your mail is authenticated, and how many people mark you as spam or ignore you. When that goes wrong, it tends to go wrong across your whole list at once, which is why it comes first.

Step 1: Find out where your mail lands

Before changing anything, look at the evidence.

• Google Postmaster Tools shows how Gmail sees your domain, including your spam rate. It’s free. You verify your domain once and the data fills in over the following days. Smaller senders may see no data until their daily volume to Gmail builds.
• Klaviyo’s deliverability reporting breaks opens, clicks, bounces and spam complaints down by inbox provider, so a drop at one provider stands out.
• A seed test sends one email to test inboxes at Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo and iCloud, and reports whether each one landed in Primary, Promotions or spam. Treat it as a guide, because Gmail sorts tabs per person and a test inbox won’t match every subscriber.

Google’s sender guidelines ask you to keep the spam rate shown in Postmaster Tools under 0.10% and never reach 0.30%. If you’re above 0.10%, start there.

Step 2: Authenticate your domain

Since February 2024, Gmail and Yahoo have required bulk senders to authenticate their mail. Google counts you as one once you’ve sent close to 5,000 emails to Gmail addresses in a single day, and that status doesn’t lapse. Below that, it’s still the setup we put in place on our client accounts:

• A branded sending domain, such as send.yourbrand.com, with SPF and DKIM set up on it. Klaviyo asks bulk senders to use one, and it’s worth doing earlier, because on the shared domain part of your reputation sits with other senders.
• A DMARC record on your root domain, with your From address on the domain you’ve authenticated. A policy of p=none is the minimum, and it still sends you reports on who is sending as your domain.
• One-click unsubscribe in the email header, which Klaviyo adds for you.

These are a few DNS records wherever your domain is managed. We make the changes for our clients ourselves.

Step 3: Look at who you’re sending to

This is a common place for spam problems to start. Sending every campaign to the whole list, including people who haven’t opened or clicked in six months, tells inbox providers that a lot of your mail goes unread, and they start filtering it.

Apple Mail Privacy Protection makes this harder to see, because it can mark an email as opened whether or not anyone read it. So we build engaged segments from clicks, site visits and orders as well as opens, send most campaigns to those, and give long-unengaged subscribers a short sunset series before they come off the list.

If you’re already in spam, the way back is the same idea done more strictly. Send only to your most engaged subscribers for a couple of weeks, then widen the segment in steps while you watch Postmaster.

Step 4: Work on Primary

Once you’re out of spam, Primary is worth chasing for the emails that matter most: the welcome series, order and shipping updates, replenishment reminders and the occasional note from the founder.

• Write those to look like a message from a person, with fewer images, one or two links and a name in the from line.
• In the welcome email, ask new subscribers to move you to Primary or hit reply. Gmail learns from each person, and replies are a good sign to it.
• Keep the same from name and address every time, and skip link shorteners.

What it’s worth

In our client work, moves into the primary inbox have lifted open rates by 10% or more, and getting client domains out of spam filters has recovered more than US$12M in revenue. Our food and beverage case study shows a deliverability clean-up ahead of a major launch.

More opens from the same list also feeds into what a customer is worth over a year. Our LTV:CAC calculator shows how that changes what you can afford to pay to win the next one.

Want a second pair of eyes?

Bring a screenshot of Postmaster Tools and your Klaviyo deliverability numbers to an LTV:CAC Gameplan call, and we’ll tell you whether deliverability is the first thing to fix or whether something else is. Book an LTV:CAC Gameplan.