6 steps to repair your sender reputation post-BFCM

With Thanksgiving so late in November this year, brands will hardly get any breathing room between Black Friday Cyber Monday and the necessary sender reputation clean-up that should follow any period of large sends.

But with proper planning, you can take a few straightforward steps in early December to get your good sender reputation back, even if you sent to your entire list several times over the holiday weekend.

Post-BFCM, here are 6 steps to take in early December to repair your sender reputation.

1. Don’t send marketing emails to anyone who isn’t expecting them

It’s a good idea to spend about 3 weeks focusing on improving your sender reputation. During this time, you’ll want to send emails that subscribers are most likely to open.

Even if a subscriber is a customer, they might still report an email as spam if they’re not expecting it. And, if the recipient is a prospect—not a customer yet—it’s simply too high of a risk to send to them during this season.

In the first few weeks after BFCM, it’s important to set any win-back, re-engagement, and sunset flows to draft mode, as these typically see lower engagement rates.

“It’s also important to exclude people who’ve ordered within the last 3–7 days,” says Gabrielle Pitman, client services director at ebusiness pros. “Make sure those subscribers are only getting your post-purchase flows. That’s why it’s important to exclude that segment from your standard campaigns.”

2. Discontinue any third-party marketing that you’re not in direct control of

If you’ve collected an email address through affiliate or referral programs, you don’t have as much control over that relationship. And this is another instance in which even a customer could report an email as spam. So, it’s best to pause sending to email addresses you collected through any third-party marketing while you’re trying to repair your sender reputation.

“Understanding where your contacts originate is essential,” says Carla Donahue, head of lifecycle marketing at WITHIN. “By partnering with third-party vendors for accurate attribution, you can differentiate between subscribers from your site and those from external sources. This helps to engage valuable customers and assess their lifetime value against those acquired through sweepstakes.”

“Prioritizing engaged subscribers and on-site opt-ins is key to rebuilding your reputation, enhancing email performance, and evaluating the effectiveness of third-party platforms,” Donahue adds.

3. Shift your content strategy to reach burnt-out subscribers—and improve click rate

Pitman emphasizes the importance of prioritizing emails with editorial content to incentivize readers to click through to your site. “Giving subscribers something valuable to motivate them to click through to your site is a critical piece of deliverability repair,” she says.

“You can have above-average open rates, but if your audience isn’t also clicking on links in your emails, any negative impact from bounces, unsubscribes, and spam complaint rates can become a higher-impact factor in your overall sender reputation,” Pitman explains.

“Tease a blog post excerpt in the email they have to click to finish reading or a tutorial video they want to watch on your site,” she advises.

4. Adjust your cadence to re-warm your subscribers

When repairing your sender reputation, it’s important to re-warm even longtime subscribers. You can base your new cadence on how frequently you normally send to a particular segment.

If you send daily

If you send 3x per week

If you send 2x per week

If you send weekly

If you send monthly

5. Remove unengaged subscribers

Let’s face it: if a subscriber didn’t engage with your marketing around BFCM—almost certainly your biggest offer and your best effort all year long—it might be time to cut them loose.

The weeks following BFCM are the best time to cull your list down to only the people that are actively engaging. If you have a segment of people who you think are likely to open, it may be worth planning a sunset flow for the weeks after you wrap up your reputation repair.

Remove or suppress any subscribers who haven’t opened or clicked a message in the last year.

6. Monitor your performance

As you go about reputation repair throughout December, make sure you’re monitoring your performance for these key email metrics:

• Spam complaint rates
• Open rates (excluding machine opens)
• Unsubscribe rates
• Click rates
• Bounce rates

“The deliverability report in Klaviyo will be your best friend as you go through this process,” says Pitman. “It can help you identify which campaigns and flows are hurting your sender reputation. Sometimes, certain domains or inbox providers have especially high bounce or unsubscribe rates, and you can easily create a segment to exclude those people from getting your emails while you’re in repair mode.”

If you do your reputation repair diligently, your rates should recover within about 3 weeks. In that case, you can return to your normal cadences and strategies. If they still haven’t improved by then, keep doing reputation repair using the tactics in this article.

Reputation repair: necessary clean-up

Reputation repair is a key part of any email marketing strategy, and you should schedule time for it after any large sends. But it’s also a good idea to do it any time you see a dip in performance.

Make sure you’re following Klaviyo best practices for sending year-round—for example, sending infrastructure must-haves, like a branded sending domain.