Hi Joseph,

Thanks for sharing your challenge—email deliverability is a crucial factor for driving conversions, and landing in the Promotions tab can be frustrating. While it’s common for marketing emails to end up in Promotions, there are strategies you can implement to improve your chances of hitting the Primary tab in Gmail and overall deliverability.

Key Best Practices for Enhanced Email Deliverability

1. Optimize Your Email Content

• Balance Text and Images: While you’ve already adjusted this, ensure the email includes a good text-to-image ratio (60:40 or 70:30). Avoid image-only emails.
• Personalization: Use Klaviyo’s dynamic fields to personalize emails with the recipient’s name, past purchases, or interests.
• Avoid Spammy Phrases: Steer clear of words like “Free,” “Buy Now,” or excessive exclamation points.
• Plain Text Version: Ensure every email has a plain-text version, which improves credibility with spam filters.

2. Build and Maintain a Healthy Email List

• Regularly clean your email list by removing inactive subscribers (use Klaviyo’s engagement-based segments).
• Use double opt-in to ensure only interested and valid users subscribe.

3. Authenticate Your Domain

• Set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records for your domain. This builds trust with email service providers and reduces the chances of your emails being flagged as spam.
• Use Klaviyo’s Dedicated Sending Domain feature to align your emails with your Shopify store’s domain (e.g., @leveret.com).

4. Test Subject Lines and Preheaders

• Use engaging and non-salesy subject lines to avoid spam filters.
• Keep preheader text relevant to the content and enticing to the reader.

5. Encourage Engagement

• Segment Your List: Send targeted campaigns to active subscribers to boost open and click rates. Klaviyo’s engagement-based segments can help here.
• Include CTAs that encourage replies (e.g., “Reply to this email if you have questions!”). Gmail prioritizes emails that generate responses.

6. Send at the Right Time

• Analyze your audience’s behavior to find the optimal send times. Klaviyo’s Smart Send Time can help identify when your audience is most likely to engage.

7. Warm-Up Your Sending Reputation

• If you’ve made recent changes (e.g., new email domain), gradually increase your sending volume to rebuild sender reputation.

8. Use a Preference Center

• Allow subscribers to choose how often they want to receive emails, reducing the chances of complaints or unsubscribes.

Additional Tips for Gmail’s Primary Tab

• Remove Promotional Elements: Avoid promotional-style email templates, like banners or excessive formatting. A simpler design can help emails appear more personal.
• Experiment with Sender Names: Use a person’s name (e.g., “Joseph at Leveret”) instead of a generic business name for the sender field.
• Minimize Links: Reduce the number of links in your email; too many can signal a promotional email.

Next Steps

I recommend testing these strategies incrementally and monitoring the impact using Klaviyo’s deliverability reports. If you’d like, I can help audit your current email setup for more tailored recommendations.

Let me know if you have any questions or need further assistance!

Best regards,
Michael
Klaviyo Expert & Email Marketing Specialist

Welcome to the Klaviyo Community ​@josephmills !

Thanks for sharing your question—it's a common challenge, so you’re not alone! 

If your emails are landing in the Promotions tab, that’s not necessarily a problem. Gmail designed the Promotions tab specifically for marketing emails like yours, and it’s still part of the inbox. 

The real concern is if your emails are landing in spam, which you can usually identify by poor open rates (e.g., below 15%) or unusually low engagement metrics.

Here’s what to check:

• Open Rates: Are they above 20%?
• Click Rates: Aim for 2%-5%.
• Spam Complaints: Keep these below 0.1%.
• Bounce Rates: Should stay under 2%.

If these metrics look healthy, then your deliverability is fine, and landing in Promotions is just Gmail doing its thing. But if your metrics are low, that could point to spam folder placement or other issues.

To test if you can land in the Primary tab, try sending emails that feel more personal and less salesy:

• Remove sales-related language (e.g., "limited-time offer," "shop now").
• Simplify the design (use plain-text).
• Limit links (1-2 max).

That said, keep in mind that for a store like Leveret, Promotions is often the right place to be! Focus on improving engagement through personalized content, targeting your most active subscribers first, and gradually re-engaging less active ones.

Let us know your open, click, and complaint rates—we’d love to dive deeper if you need more guidance.

Hi ​@josephmills, this is a very common question and a source of a lot of confusion! The advice you got from the "experts" is a bit outdated and misses the main point of how Gmail works today.

Here's the most important thing to understand: The Promotions tab is not the spam folder. It IS the inbox.

Gmail is actually doing its job correctly. It sees a marketing email from a Shopify store (with an unsubscribe link, images of products, and promotional language) and categorizes it as a promotion. Your deliverability is likely fine; the issue is categorization.

Trying to "trick" the algorithm to get into the Primary tab is a losing battle. A better strategy is to embrace the Promotions tab and focus on making your emails stand out there.

Here are the best practices I'd recommend:

1. Shift Your Goal: Win in the Promotions Tab

People actively go to the Promotions tab looking for deals and updates from brands they like. The real goal isn't to land in Primary, it's to get opened and clicked, wherever you land. This means your Subject Line and Preview Text are more important than ever. Make them irresistible.

2. The ONLY Way to Get to Primary: User Action

You can't force your way into the Primary tab, but your subscribers can pull you in. Gmail learns from user behaviour. The single most effective way to get your emails moved is to ask your subscribers to do it.

• Drag and Drop: In your welcome email or on your post-purchase thank you page, add a small section with a simple instruction: "To make sure you don't miss our updates, find our email in your Promotions tab and drag it to your Primary tab." When they do this, Gmail will ask if it should do this for all future messages. This is the strongest signal you can get.
• Add to Contacts: Ask subscribers to add your sending address (e.g., hello@leveret.com) to their contacts.
• Reply to an Email: An email that gets a reply is almost guaranteed to be seen as important. Your welcome email is a great place to ask a simple question like, "What's your favourite style of pajamas?" to encourage a response.

3. Solidify Your Technical Authentication

While this might not move you from Promotions to Primary, it's the foundation of all good deliverability and builds trust with inbox providers. You need to have perfect authentication.

• SPF & DKIM: These are like your email's passport and driver's license, proving you are who you say you are. Your email platform (e.g., Klaviyo, Mailchimp) will provide these records for you to add to your Shopify domain's DNS settings.
• DMARC: This is the security policy that tells Gmail what to do if an email fails authentication. As of 2024, this is a requirement for sending bulk mail to Gmail. A quick check shows your domain leveret.com does not appear to have a DMARC record set up. This is a critical gap you should fix immediately.

Action Item: Ask your developer to set up a basic DMARC record. A simple starting policy is v=DMARC1; p=none;.

Do these things, and you'll see much better engagement, which is far more valuable than where you land in the inbox. Good luck!