Trying to get a sense of what's actually live for people past the welcome sequence every ESP hands you as a default template. win-back, post-purchase, abandoned cart, some re-engagement flow, or something specific to your business that doesn't fit a normal category? also curious what you built and then killed because it didn't perform, half the time that's the more interesting story than what's still running.  

I had a list of 6,500 engaged substack subscribers and set up a Kit account to promote a webinar. We only had 3 signups for the webinar and in a test yesterday to 6 owned accounts (mix of gmail/outlook) everything went to spam. I know there’s interest for the subject material because we got more signups from other sources using far fewer leads. Here was my process:

* Started with a warmup process of sending a text-only email through Kit to about 100 of the most engaged subscribers, and then slowly working our way down over about 10 days through the list of 6.5k subscribers. The least-engaged group still had opened at least 1 substack newsletter in the past few months and the vast majority opened 5 or more in the last few months.

* After going through about 4.5k subscribers in the list with the text-only email, over the span of 2 weeks we sent out a 3-step sequence to the entire list (in segments) with a link to the webinar.

Judging by the number of signups, I’m thinking these messages were probably hitting spam very early on in the process. Obviously open and click rates don’t tell us anything.

I will add the caveat that of the 6.5k list, many of them didn’t explicitly opt-in to the substack newsletter, but as I said, all of them opened 1 or more newsletters in the past several months and didn’t unsubscribe so I would think this list didn’t have a high risk of everything going to spam.

What went wrong here and what should we do for the next webinar promotion?

Thank you

Transactional emails keep landing in spam even though the usual email authentication is set up correctly. I traced it to a shared ip with a poor reputation, has anyone fixed this by switching to a dedicated ip?

I’m starting from zero and want to learn email marketing properly, including copywriting, list building, design, automation, segmentation, deliverability, and analytics.
Which platform/course would you recommend for a beginner, and what learning path would you follow if you were starting today?

I just ran a webinar and blasted out emails to 6k+ subscribers to advertise it. Kit's analytics say the click through rate was 11.61%, which would mean about 700 clicks. We had only 3 signups for the event through Kit. That math simply doesn't work out. I'm assuming the vast majority of those clicks were bots - but how can I tell?

Hey all, just wondering if anyone else has had any issues with the Klaviyo AI / MCP stuff? I've got a client who has just started using the AI assistant and has found it really frustrating.
Like, it's really patchy on its segment creation. It's been very inconsistent. Sometimes they've been really impressed with how it can create a complex segment, but then other times it will leave off really important elements.

So, for example, it will capture most of what is needed for the segment but then randomly ignore the fact that it needed to only include active subscribers. In the end, it can take more time than if they were to do it manually. Annoying.

Also, they've found it's really terrible for writing subject lines. It almost always defaults to a summary style and rarely creates curiosity. And it 100% of the time writes them in title case which isn't great if you like a more casual style.

Anyone else run into these problems? Would love to know if there's a way around them or if you've got any other useful tips.

Or is there another platform with a better MCP that you'd recommend?

Over the past few months I've used Kit blasts to my company's substack subscriber list to promote a free webinar we're doing.

The first time I blasted a large list of 20K+ and got 19 signups, but the list wasn't fully opt-in and it seems like everything started going to spam because we only got 3 more subscribers for a total of 22 in our follow-up blasts.

The second time I completely restarted our Kit account, isolated our 6k more engaged Substack subscribers, double verified the leads, and did a proper warmup in Kit before sending out the blasts with a link to the webinar. We got a total of 3 signups for the webinar from this.

So, I'm wondering: did my warmup even work? Were all the messages going to spam the second time around? How can I tell? What's a good way to analyze this?

EDIT: for most of our campaigns we accidentally had a setting on which required people to sign into zoom with a zoom account in order to register for the webinar. I'm assuming that might've had an impact.

Let’s say a client asks you: “Can you give me some numbers as our revenue goal from core Klayvio flows?”

Context:
You’re helping create basic flows from scratch and this comes up.

My question is, how do you answer that question?

- Do you set that goal based on total revenue?
- Do you use ballpark numbers from their industry?
- Or anything else…

Thanks

I work at Claspo, a popup builder, and this is our own data. No link, the numbers are all here.

We pulled every popup published by accounts on the platform over three years. 779M impressions. A vision model tagged each one across ~120 parameters (layout, field count, incentive, trigger, tone), then we checked the cuts by hand.

Signup conversion by what the form asks for:

• Email only: 2.48%
• Email + promo code: 3.85%
• Email + promo code + exit intent: 5.76%
• Gamification + countdown: 16.13%
• Multistep: 0.43%
• Phone field kills it wherever it shows up. Average across all signup forms is 3.53%, gamified ones 9.18%, and 95% of the top performers ask for one or two fields.

By industry:

• Food and drink: 6.75%
• Ecommerce: 4.72%
• Education: 4.19%
• Travel: 2.58%
• SaaS: 1.06%
• Media and publishing: 0.33%

Themed campaigns pull about 15% more clicks than evergreen (6.7% CTR vs 5.85%) and fewer subscribers, 0.5% against 0.72%. Halloween is the extreme case, 6.1% CTR and 0.16% signup rate. People play with the popup and skip the list. BFCM is the only season where both hold up, 6.61% and 1.06%, which is the one result here that matched what I expected going in.

Things wrong with this data, since someone will ask. The sample is self-selected, every brand in it chose to run popups and pay for a tool. Averages blend a 500-visitor store with an enterprise catalog. Machine labeling across 120 parameters has error in it that we never quantified. And the top-percentile numbers are survivorship, since nobody leaves a wheel of fortune spinning at 0.4% for long.

Ask if you want a specific cut for your niche, I can pull it.

with printify's pop up store is there any way to collect buyer's emails and have a checkbox for them to opt in to marketing?

Complete beginner here. I’ve read that it is best practice to segment your email list and send personalised emails.

How did you choose the segments? Do you segment people immediately they join the list? Or based on their past behaviour?

The more I think about this, the more confused I get because:

• If you segment immediately, you’d have to ask for a lot of information on the form no?
• Or if do it later then you’d have to send unpersonalised emails until you have enough data to segment?

Really curious to learn how you do this

I'm looking for insight from the political agencies and campaign managers.Gmail’s new Verified Sender Program for political campaigns has definitely caught my attention.

But I’m curious about something from the people who were actually in the trenches back in 2022.

Google rolled out its political email pilot that year with the promise of giving verified campaigns a better shot at reaching the inbox instead of automatically getting buried in spam.

Did anyone actually see a meaningful improvement in deliverability?

Not the theoretical benefit. Not the press release.

Did you see better inbox placement? Higher open rates? More clicks? More donations? Or did user engagement and spam complaints ultimately make the impact pretty marginal?

With the new Verified Sender Program coming online, I’d love to hear from campaign email folks who participated in or closely watched the 2022 pilot.

Did it move the needle?

- Campaign A goes to 100,000 people, gets 20,000 clicks = 20% click rate

- Campaign B goes to 1,000 people, gets 500 clicks = 50% click rate

The average of these two campaigns isn't SUM(Click Rate)/#, e.g. (20%+50%)/2 = 35%. It's SUM(Delivered)/SUM(Sent) = (20,000+500)/(100,000+1,000) = 20,500/101,000 = 20.3%.

Yeah, so if you use AVG(click rate) in excel, it'll be wrong, but look better.

My welcome series has been live for a good while at this point, no complaints. That’s the extent of what I’ve built though, and everything else is still one campaign going out to the whole list every time.
I know the next step is real segmentation and actual nurture flows instead of sending everyone the same email, I just haven't figured out what that looks like in practice. Here's what I'm trying to work out:

• Segmenting based on real behaviour, not just opens and clicks

• Sequences that branch depending on what someone does next

• Getting purchase history and email activity to actually talk to each other

• A list that stays current without me manually updating it

What is everyone actually running to accomplish this? I'm trying to figure out what's realistic to build versus what would be overcomplicating things for no reason.

I'm assessing some no-code email build tools like Stensul and Knak and I'm wondering a few things about Stensul as their help docs aren't public.

1) can you bulk update many assets into multiple MAPs meaning not one-email-at-a-time, I'm thinking SFMC, Marketo, maybe Pardot, we use all of these. If I build 10 emails, can I bulk sync them to the MAP? Does Stensul or Knak do this? I can't see in the docs.

2) do they have a way to code-test, meaning can I easily see the code before pushing a new element live. I'm thinking like Knak let's you create what they call a module that is a reusable component but you can't really see the code until you push to the MAP and it generates the HTML

3) Does Stensul have an API? Crazy but it doesn't really say and I want an open API for, well, lot's of things I want to automate.

Popup trigger logic by page type

A lot of stores use the same popup logic everywhere. That usually means someone lands on a product page, starts checking sizes or variants, and gets a newsletter popup 5 seconds later. On product pages, behavior makes more sense than time. If someone keeps switching between options, spends a while on the page, or looks stuck, show something useful: a size guide, short quiz, or “need help choosing?” prompt. At that point the popup is tied to what the person is actually doing. On collection pages, show a product finder after someone has scrolled through enough products or used several filters. On zero-results search pages, ask what they were looking for or offer a way to continue. On blog pages, show something related to the article instead of a generic store-wide discount.

You may collect fewer emails this way than with a “10% off after 5 seconds” popup. The upside is that those leads come with more context. If someone completes a quiz or product finder, you already know what they were interested in, so the follow-up can use that instead of starting from zero.

Disclosure: I work in the popup/onsite marketing space.

Is there actual money in email design, or is it mostly course-selling hype?

I’m a creative person who’s been struggling since AI blew up. I used to work full time as a copywriter, but that feels like a dead end now. People don’t value content the way they used to, so pay has tanked and competition is brutal.

I still want to work in a creative field, though. I keep seeing @drippityemail on TikTok and I love how creative you can get with email design. He sells a $900 course, which is way out of my budget, and it’s got me wondering: is that course just his real income stream, or can you actually make solid money as an email designer with clients, hence the steep price tag of his course?

Since I’ve done copywriting, writing the copy myself would come naturally, though honestly it’s not what I want to focus on. Still, I imagine the two skills would complement each other well.

So my main questions:

1. Do clients actually pay well for good email design, or has AI taken over?

2. What’s the best way to learn it without dropping $900 on a course? (Link for reference, not promoting: https://drippityemailmarketing.thinkific.com/products/courses/email-marketing-course)

3. How do you even source the materials? I know AI can generate a lot of it, but can you design a genuinely good email for a business that doesn’t already have solid brand assets, a decent site, good photography, etc.? Or does that just cap what’s possible?

Not trying to shill the guy, he’s just the reason I started looking into this. Mainly want honest input from people who’ve actually done this or hired someone for it.

Also, if you’re an email designer, may I be as cheeky to ask what you get paid per email/email sequence, or how your rate works?

Thanks so much in advance!!

Hello guys,

I use Kit for my email service provider. I have 524 subscribers right now, with a 65% open rate. I just noticed that, because I have double opt-in, the 524 subscribers are the confirmed ones, and I have about 109 unconfirmed subscribers.

1. What should I do with my unconfirmed subscribers? Should I add them to my confirm list and see if they open? Should I send another confirmation email if that's possible through Kit, or should I remove them?
2. What are your thoughts on double opt-in? If my open rate is currently at 65%, is it worth taking it out to see how it may affect my open rate?

Hi there! Looking for some advice. We have quite a few disengaged subscribers (haven't opened an email from us in 12 months), and it's making our open rates lower than I would like. I'm running a winback flow now, but truthfully the numbers on that are looking a little grim. I'm team archive those subscribers, but we do sell ads in our newsletters do I see the reason for keeping them as well. Any insight as to what your team does would be great!

Hi everyone! I’m a complete beginner trying to learn by doing so please explain like I’m 5 :D

How are you getting subscribers to your list?

I’ve seen lots of advice to offer a freebie (guides, checklists, tools) instead of a simple form. But I tried offering an Email course a while ago and the results weren’t bad…but it wasn’t great either

So how did you actually decide what your lead magnet would be? And how can you tell if the freebie is working well or not?

Running a small ecom brand with basically no dedicated marketing person. Its just me and one other person splitting everything. We've been doing email pretty much manually and its getting out of hand as we grow.
Dont have the budget to hire an in-house email person and not sure if an agency makes sense at our size either. How do lean teams actually handle this without dropping the ball on it completely?

Amazon SES account under review for a few weeks due to direct complaints — has anyone experienced this?

Amazon SES recently placed my account under review because of the number of direct complaints.

I contacted AWS Support and explained the changes I made to my email-sending process. Their response was:

They also said they will contact me again at the end of the review period.

I have already made changes to my sending process and am being much more careful with list quality, sending practices, and complaint monitoring.

I’m curious about other people’s experience with SES reviews:

• How long did your review last?
• What complaint rate did you have when SES placed you under review?
• How quickly did your complaint rate need to improve?
• Did AWS automatically remove the review after a few weeks, or did you need to contact Support again?
• Were there any specific changes that seemed to help?

I’m especially interested in experiences from people who have gone through an SES review for complaint rate issues rather than a bounce-rate issue.

I’m getting ready to start a newsletter and have done a lot of research on platforms. I keep coming back to Kit and Beehiiv, and I can make a good argument for either one.

What I really want to hear now is from people who have actually lived with one of these platforms for a while.

If you’re on Kit, is there anything you’ve learned that makes you wish you had gone with Beehiiv or another platform?

If you’re on Beehiiv, is there anything you’ve run into that makes you wish you had chosen Kit or something else?

I’m especially interested in the things you don’t find out until after you’ve been using the platform for a while. What became frustrating as you grew? What did you think would matter that really didn’t? How has monetization been? And if you were starting over today, would you choose the same platform?

I’m less interested in another feature comparison and more interested in what you know now that you wish you knew when you started.

Curious how far people here go with list hygiene before a larger campaign.

Do you mainly check whether addresses are technically valid, or do you also suppress contacts based on engagement, for example, people who haven't opened or clicked for a long period?

I've seen quite different approaches to where validation ends and broader deliverability/list hygiene begins.

What does your checklist look like?

This one's flying under the radar for email marketers. Italy's data protection authority (the Garante) ruled that an individualized open-tracking pixel, the invisible 1x1 image that tells you who opened and when, counts as accessing the recipient's device, the same legal category as a cookie. So when it's tied to a specific person and used to measure opens or campaign performance, it now needs prior consent. Senders have until October 28 to adjust.

France's CNIL took a similar line earlier this year, so this looks like a direction, not a one-country quirk.

The part that makes it awkward for marketing:

- "Open rate" as most ESPs track it (per-recipient) is exactly what's in scope.

- Consent has to be collected up front, separate from the newsletter subscription itself.

- Genuinely anonymized, aggregate open counts (no IP, no per-person ID) are the carve-out, but most tools don't work that way by default.

Anyone with EU recipients actually building consent for pixel tracking into their signup flow yet, or is this going to be a scramble in October?