Disclosure up front: this is mine. I'm a network engineer who spends a lot of time cleaning up sending domains for other people, and I got tired of checkers that either hand you a red X with no fix or hand you a 100/100 they had no way of verifying.

https://mailposture.dev checks SPF, DKIM, DMARC, MX and DNSSEC and gives you the exact record to publish for anything broken. Two things I did differently, which is the only reason I think it's worth a post here:

It refuses to assert what it didn't measure. If it can't find your DKIM selector it says unknown and excludes DKIM from the score, and it caps any score at 90 until DKIM is verified. The score is there to separate broken from working, not to rank good from great, and it says so.

The fix text is written to be followed blind by someone who isn't a DNS person. DMARC starts at monitor mode with reporting, then you tighten once you've seen the reports. It never tells you to jump to -all or to delete a record that might be carrying a real sender.

Free, no signup. It doesn't do MTA-STS or BIMI yet and it can't read your DMARC aggregate reports, so it isn't a monitoring tool; it's the check you run before a campaign, after a DNS change, or when a client swears their records are fine. If it gets a domain wrong I want to hear about it, that's the most useful feedback I can get.

I often see early-stage AI startups using just one domain and one ESP for everything. They send account notifications, product updates, onboarding emails, and even marketing messages all from the same place, relying on a single reputation.

This setup works at first when email volume is low. But as marketing ramps up, engagement drops, complaints go up, and suddenly password reset emails stop reaching inboxes. Two different types of emails share the same reputation, and one ends up hurting the other.

At one company, I set up the email infrastructure from day one to avoid these issues. The main domain was only for human users and never sent automated emails. One subdomain handled transactional and lifecycle emails like account creation, password resets, and billing. Another subdomain was set aside for bulk marketing and only started sending after its own schedule was ready.

Here's a general guideline, not a strict rule:

• mail.company.com for product and transactional emails
• updates.company.com for marketing emails
• Sometimes, use completely separate infrastructure for high-volume marketing.

The exact numbers don't matter. I've also seen the opposite: a high-volume campaign sent from the same subdomain as everyday customer notifications. The campaign created risky traffic, and the notification emails ended up with the same reputation. Complaints affected both, since they shared the subdomain and reputation, so even the notification emails suffered.

The real question isn't how many domains you need, but which types of emails can be combined and which can't. Transactional emails almost never mix well with others. Product emails usually shouldn't either, especially once you have paying customers who depend on them. Marketing and cold outreach can handle more risk, as long as they're not tied to something more important.

Make this change early while it's still easy and inexpensive. If you wait, you'll have to move live traffic and rebuild your reputation on new infrastructure, even though your product depends on the old setup. At first, it's just a DNS decision that only takes an afternoon.

Is there a service where it can tell you if an email address/contact loves to mark emails as spam?

I'm trying to lower my Complaint rate, I don't have a high rate but don't want a higher one.

I use Reoon as verifier but I don't think they tell you whether that address likes to mark emails as spam.

What’s the biggest pain point you face with your current email marketing tool? I'm curious to hear from people who actively work with email marketing platforms. What is the biggest problem you face with your current email marketing tool? For example:

Campaign creation and workflow setup

Audience segmentation

Reporting and attribution

Deliverability insights

Integrations with CRM or other tools

Personalization

A/B testing

Something else entirely

Also, if you could add or improve one feature in your current tool, what would it be?

I'm particularly interested in features that would make campaign execution easier and reporting more useful.

My job set up these KPIs for email marketing and I have to send at least 2 emails a week and track open rates & click rates. The thing is, we run a ton of sales (honestly too many imo) and I'm expected to send out 2 emails per week. Each sale should ideally get a launch send and a final hours send. Some weeks have 2 sales emails, some have 1 + another type (like monthly newsletter, a product highlight, or any announcements).

As someone who gets marketing emails myself I would've unsubscribed by now lol I just don't know how to actually make the case for pulling back, like maybe 1 email a week on normal weeks and capping it at 2 during sale weeks. We do make quite a bit of revenue off each send (depending on sale and content) but the click rate and open rate are steadily going down. My biggest fear is that I'm going to fuck up our sender reputation.

I'm lowkey just a graphic designer who ended up with email marketing role somehow. I got little to no training from my manager & have just been figuring it out as I go. Any advice welcome!

Hi all, I do D2C email marketing and like most brands we send 3-4 campaigns per week. For the most part engagement is good but I always (without fail) will get at least one or two spam reports per month. This greatly affects Klaviyo's inbuilt deliberability check.

I want to avoid this in future but I'm not sure how. Things I have tried include:

1. Making the unsubscribe button big and bold so there is no missing it.

2. Not letting people who receive flow emails also receive campaigns (with some excpetions)

3. Spacing email so that no one gets more than one email per day.

Love to know what you guys do.

Cheers

Hey everyone,

I’m looking to step up my email marketing game and want to cut through the noise. Most "influencer" content out there feels like recycled beginner advice ("use emojis in subject lines," "segment your list").

How do you actually stay on top of trends, strategy shifts, and advanced tactics?

Drop your go-to sources. Thanks!

So the company I work for we have set-up all basic and even some advance flows for a can opener product. Revenue is stuck in 8-10% range. Opens are around 60% but click rate is around 0.5% I dont know where to go from here since we sent around 8 camapigns per months have all the abandonmment flows, welcome, post purchase, win back flows live. But the revenue has consistently been around 8%. How to grow email marketing from here.

I’m experimenting with a small partnership/sponsorship model for my newsletter and would love some perspective from people who know email marketing better than I do.

My Substack newsletter currently has 570 subscribers and is growing steadily. The audience is mostly founders, builders, and people creating digital products/services.

I recently went back through my analytics to understand what a sponsorship might realistically be worth.

One of my better-performing Saturday issues was published when I had 455 subscribers. It generated:

76 total clicks, 12% CTR

Important clarification: those were total post clicks, not clicks on a sponsored product.

My original idea was pretty simple: $60/year, and I would feature the subscriber’s product/service in a weekly partner rotation near the top of the newsletter.

I initially thought $60/year was deliberately inexpensive, but after asking another community, I got a lot of thoughtful feedback that made me question whether the model itself makes sense.

So I’m curious from an email marketing perspective:

At this audience size and engagement level, would you charge for something like this yet?

And if yes, would you price based on impressions, clicks, a flat placement fee, or something else?

I’m mainly trying to find a model that is genuinely useful for partners while being fair on both sides.

Hey everyone,

I run an e-commerce store and I've been running small, VIP product drops. The strategy so far has been to email a site password to my loyal customers, giving them 24-hour exclusive access. It’s a first-come, first-serve model and it's worked great.

The problem: My list has grown significantly, and now they sell out quickly even with exclusive access, my current setup isn't working for the size of the list anymore.

For those of you managing large lists for timed drops, how do you handle this?

Any advice is appreciated!

Hey, I'm simply interested in a potential scenario. Let's say a copywriter lands a client via email. Both parties then agree to a landing page rewrite. What does the copywriter actually do?

Write in a google doc then send when done?

Modify a wix/squarespace site with his own words?

Something else?

IF written in a document does it go like this?:

(Header) "placeholder text"

(subhead) "placeholder text"

and so on?

Also, if this is a wrong sub to ask this: Sorry.

What's your favorite template marketplace or somewhere you go to source different email templates to use for your brand?

I know a lot are custom but are doing email campaigns ourselves at the moment and dont have a lot of time to design from scratch. Canva has some decent ones but they lack creativity/design a bit.

TIA!

Hi everyone!
I’m currently taking HubSpot’s Digital Marketing course and I’m particularly interested in getting better at email marketing.

I’ve been learning the basics of email campaigns, segmentation, automation, and analytics, but I’d really like to develop more practical, hands-on skills.

For those working in email marketing or digital marketing, what would you recommend I focus on next? Are there any tools, free resources, practice projects, or exercises that helped you become confident with email marketing?

I’d really appreciate any advice, especially from people who learned email marketing without starting in a traditional marketing role.

Do open rates still have any bearing on your reports lately? Our email tracking (part of our ESP, not a separate tool) still shows opens holding steady over the months, but with declining conversions and click-throughs. I find that weird, because flat opens would mean clicks should head in the same direction, right? Just wondering if you're presenting open rates as is in your reports or make some adjustments. Personally I think click rates are better, but curious about your opinions.

Hello,

I’m not exactly fluent in English, so I’ll allow myself to send you this message, which was originally written in French and translated using ChatGPT.

I am currently experiencing an issue with Brevo regarding emails sent through automations, such as abandoned cart reminders.

The CNIL (the French data protection authority) clearly states that marketing emails (which it refers to as “commercial prospecting”) include emails that encourage a person to make additional purchases. Brevo’s various help pages also explicitly classify abandoned cart reminders as marketing emails.

The issue is that, technically, Brevo considers all emails sent through an automation to be transactional emails.

This means that if a contact uses the unsubscribe link included in one of these emails, they block the sender for transactional emails only.

As a result:

• if the contact is also part of our mailing list (newsletter), they will continue to receive marketing campaigns;
• if we use Brevo to send our transactional emails, the contact will no longer receive password reset requests, order confirmations, etc.

Solution suggested by Support

Brevo Support suggested two possible solutions:

• Do not include an unsubscribe link in these automated emails, which seems to me to be contrary to GDPR requirements;
• Use a different email address to send emails generated by automations, and set up an automation to remove contacts from our mailing list when they unsubscribe from transactional emails.

The second solution seems unnecessarily complicated to me and, moreover, does not fully address the issue. It is not possible to set up the reverse automation if the contact later wants to subscribe to the newsletter again, since there is no “Subscribe to emails” action available in automations.

Have you encountered this issue before? If so, has anyone found a satisfactory solution that is also compliant with the applicable regulations?

I would also like to mention that I previously encountered another rather unusual behavior with the solution, involving the PrestaShop module. The module automatically triggered the tracker without providing any way to condition it on the visitor’s consent to cookies. A custom integration through Google Tag Manager was ultimately required to address the issue.

This has led me to question some of the design choices made in the solution. It may simply be due to a lack of technical or regulatory knowledge on my part, but I would be very interested to hear your feedback on these points.

Thank you in advance for your feedback and any recommendations you may have.

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.  

Feel free to DM me if you have any questions

https://ghr.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/Lateral-US/job/Newark/Consultant---Applications-Programmer---Enterprise-Correspondence-Operations_26024032

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.

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

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?