The need to improve email deliverability is an ongoing priority for any eCommerce store. Deliverability the foundation of effective digital engagement, especially for jewelry eCommerce brands. That’s because trust and reputation are critical for online jewelry purchases.

When deliverability is low or unstable, sales and revenue suffer. In this article, we’re taking a look at a jewelry eCommerce brand who succeeded in boosting sales by addressing complex email deliverability issues.

About the Store: Leaders in Personalized Jewelry eCommerce

Personalized jewelry is a growing eCommerce vertical, with more and more customers expressing a preference for customized pieces over pre-made ones. Our client is a leader in this space. They provide premium quality pieces that capture personal narratives.

These aren’t spontaneous, low-cost buys; they’re high-value purchases. Because of this, trust is crucial for this brand, as with most jewelry eCommerce brands. For our client, fluctuating email deliverability challenged this trust, limiting the reach of their email channel and posing a risk to both their sales and their hard-earned reputation.

Deliverability Challenges: Reaching the Primary Inbox

The store had fluctuating deliverability for some time. The Hustler Marketing team were well aware of this, and they managed to keep major issues at bay through targeted actions:

• Carefully segmenting the audience
• Avoiding any “spammy” words that might affect reputation
• Adding hidden texts on campaigns to improve text to image ratio 

These strategic measures helped to satisfy Gmail’s algorithm and get campaigns into the primary inbox. But the team also recognized the need for a more permanent solution to improve email deliverability. So, they came together to design a strategy that could finally get the store past these issues.

The Solution: Creative and Technical Teams Come Together to Improve Email Deliverability

This action plan centered on the account’s reputation. At the outset, the team had a transparent conversation with the client. It was important that they understood that the strategy would involve a short term reduction in revenue, followed by a gradual, sustainable increase. In the long term, this tradeoff would be worth it, because it would mean more emails in primary inboxes.

Once everyone was on the same page, the work began in two phases.

Phase 1: Restoring a Solid Email Domain Reputation

The Hustler Marketing team knew that the account’s reputation was the bedrock of future success. So they devised a multi-faceted approach, combining insights from copywriters, designers and Klaviyo experts.

Here were the main actions they took:

Copywriting practices to improve email deliverability:

• Shortening campaigns to be more focused and reader-friendly
• Ensuring campaigns contained a more text-based and informative style
• Meticulously avoiding any language that could trigger spam filters 
• Including more motivational, inspirational and informational style newsletters to build authority and trust

Interactive design elements:

• Interactive content was added to campaigns. For example, asking readers to vote for their favorite products, or adjacent topics like their favorite vacation spots boosted click rates, enhancing account reputation

Technical and strategic fixes:

• Offering promotional discount codes if they replied to emails. This resulted in a high number of replies, delivering a major boost to reputation
• A GlockApps spam test was performed on a weekly basis to track improvements and figure out whether the plan was working

What About a Dedicated Sender Domain?

The team chose not to set up a dedicated sender domain at this time, although this might seem like the obvious quick fix to improve email deliverability. When you set up a dedicated sender domain, it’s important to make sure your reputation is already healthy. If it isn’t, it will be extra hard to achieve that with a new sender domain. Once that more basic problem is solved, it makes sense to start warming up with a new domain.

Using GlockApps, the team was able to regularly check whether emails were reaching inboxes. They could respond quickly to issues that these tests detected.

Phase 2: Combining an Improved Reputation with a New Sender Domain

With the account’s reputation already on the rise, it was time to set up a new sender domain and warm up the list once more. The team began sending only to highly engaged readers. From there, they gradually increased the segments.

Campaign 1 – Super Mega Engaged Segment – No more than 20/30k profiles
Campaign 2 – Same as Campaign 1
Campaigns 3 & 4 – Super engaged, no more than 30/40k profiles
Campaigns 5 & 6 – No more than 50k profiles
Campaigns 7 & 8 – No more than 60k profiles
Campaign 9, – No more than 80k profiles
Campaigns 10 to 19- No more than 100k profiles

They very gradually moved towards more design-heavy campaigns once it became clear that this style was getting more clicks and orders.

At this point, the account’s reputation was much better. But email campaigns were still landing in the “promotions” tab. The Hustler Marketing team wanted to go the extra mile and get them into the “primary” tab. 

Improving Email Deliverability Through Strategic Promotion

To do this, they sent subscribers 3 teaser emails. These emails let the audience know two things:

• A very exciting promotion was coming, SOON
• It would only be live for a limited time
• They would need to move the email to primary to get a notification when the sale began

This was a spam-free, genuinely helpful message that got readers to perform the key action themselves. Of course, the promised sale arrived on time, and it was exciting enough to achieve huge results. 

This really helped finalize the team’s deliverability project. By this time, reputation was in a great place, open rates were stable, click rates were healthy, and the emails were landing in primary.

Revenue Follows Reputation and Improved Email Deliverability

It didn’t take long for email revenue to pick up as the team predicted it would. With more emails and email flows landing where customers would actually see them, the store saw a gradual but healthy uptick in sales from June to September:

Email flows saw a 69% improvement in revenue attributable to email. Campaign-based email revenue grew by 31% in the same period.

Without the long-term vision and expertise behind this strategy, that revenue would have remained out of reach.

Check out our case studies for more expert insights and email marketing toolkits.