If your open rates have dropped and revenue from email is down, there’s a good chance your emails aren’t reaching the inbox at all.
Landing in the spam folder isn’t always about spammy copy or bad intent – it’s usually a signal. You’ve been emailing too many disengaged people for too long, and the inbox providers are stepping in.
At Shawfire Media, we’ve seen hundreds of brands struggle with emails going to spam — but the fix always starts with rebuilding trust.
You can fix it. But you have to treat it like rebuilding trust.
Inbox providers like Gmail are looking at engagement patterns. Not just once – but over time.
They’re tracking things like:
If enough signals point toward low engagement, your sender reputation drops – and Gmail starts redirecting your emails to spam to “protect” their users.
That’s not personal. It’s their algorithm doing its job.
Spam placement usually comes from one or more of the following:
Inbox providers are responding to behavior. If people consistently ignore or reject your emails, that behavior trains the algorithm over time.
This isn’t about doing one thing right. It’s about stacking enough good signals to shift how inbox providers treat your emails.
Start with subscribers who’ve opened or clicked in the last 30–90 days. This gives you a higher chance of getting opens, which tells Gmail that people still want your emails.
Even if you have 100,000 subscribers, don’t keep blasting all of them. Focus on quality over quantity until your sender reputation improves.
No gimmicks. Keep it honest, clear, and aligned with what the reader expects. Use personalization or curiosity if it fits – but avoid spam triggers like all caps, aggressive urgency, or overuse of emojis.
Design the email to guide the reader to a single, clear action. If people open but don’t click, it’s a sign that the email didn’t land.
Remove inactive emails, hard bounces, and anyone who hasn’t engaged in 6+ months. The health of your list is more important than its size.
If you’re using Klaviyo, check your domain health and engagement benchmarks weekly. Look at open rates, click rates, and spam complaints. Improvement here = better inbox placement later.
A supplement brand we worked with was sending daily emails to their full list – over 100,000 contacts. Engagement tanked. Revenue dropped. Open rates dipped below 8%, and Gmail flagged their domain.
We stripped everything back.
For the next 3 weeks, they only emailed their top 20% most engaged subscribers. We restructured their campaigns with better subject lines, clearer CTAs, and more focused segmentation.
By week six, their deliverability score started climbing. Open rates pushed past 20%. Revenue doubled – using fewer sends than before.
The problem wasn’t their offer. It was their sender reputation.
This is fixable – but only if you stop treating email like a volume game. It’s not how many people you reach. It’s how many people care when you show up.
Need help fixing your sender reputation? Shawfire Media can help you improve deliverability and boost email performance.
At Shawfire Media, we help eCommerce brands grow retention the right way - no gimmicks, no shortcuts, just smart systems that compound over time.
We’ve packaged it into a short guide.
