How We Helped A Personalized Jewelry Brand Recover From a Deliverability Crisis and Bring Open Rates Back Above 50%
Campaign open rate recovery after deliverability intervention
Campaign revenue roughly doubled within 6 weeks of starting work
This US-based personalized jewelry brand operates at significant scale. In the six months prior to working with us, their store generated over $20M in revenue with $3.6M attributed to Klaviyo across email and SMS – across a list of over 764,000 active email profiles and 473,000 active phone numbers. Email and SMS were not a secondary channel for this brand. They were central to the business.
In June 2025, the brand went through a full rebrand. New brand name, new domain, new sender name, new sender address. Everything changed at once. And while the rebrand was a necessary business decision, the email consequences were severe and immediate.
Every subscriber on the list had opted in under the old brand name. Now they were receiving emails from a sender they did not recognise, from a domain their inbox provider had no history with. Gmail, Hotmail, and Outlook – the three providers covering the majority of the list – had no trust signals for the new domain whatsoever. The result was a deliverability collapse that, if left unaddressed, would have caused lasting damage to one of the brand’s most important revenue channels.
When they came to us in July 2025, the domain reputation was classified as “low” in Google Postmaster Tools. Spam rates had spiked to 0.5% – well above Google’s recommended threshold. Campaign open rates had fallen from above 40% to 24%. Bounce rates were elevated. Unsubscribe rates were climbing. The list was large, the infrastructure was in place, but almost nothing was reaching the inbox with the engagement it needed.
This was a fixable problem. But it required a precise, methodical approach – not just sending fewer emails and hoping things improved on their own.
Before Budai Media
After Budai Media
1. Diagnosing Where the Problem Was Coming From
The first step was understanding exactly which parts of the list were causing the deliverability damage. Not all email providers responded the same way to the rebrand, and treating the list as a single audience was making things worse.
The data showed clearly that the damage was concentrated in three providers: Gmail, Hotmail, and Outlook. These three accounted for the majority of the bounce rate elevation, the spam complaints, and the low open rates. Other providers were performing at 50%+ open rates. Gmail was at 16.12%. Hotmail and Outlook were at 14-15%.
This asymmetry was the key insight. The domain had no reputation history with these providers post-rebrand, and because sends were going to the full list of approximately 80,000 recipients regardless of engagement level, every campaign was generating negative signals – low opens, high bounces, elevated spam complaints – that were compounding the reputation damage with every send.
The fix was not to send less broadly to everyone. It was to send very selectively to these three providers specifically, while continuing normal sends to the rest of the list.
2. ESP-Level Segmentation and Controlled Warm-Up
We rebuilt the campaign segmentation architecture around provider-level separation. For Gmail, Hotmail, and Outlook subscribers, we created dedicated segments that initially included only subscribers who had engaged within the last 10 days. This took the send volume for these providers from tens of thousands of recipients down to a small, highly engaged audience – the people most likely to open, least likely to mark as spam.
The logic was precise: send only to subscribers who have demonstrated recent engagement, generate strong positive signals with these providers, and then use those signals to gradually rebuild domain reputation.
As open rates climbed and negative metrics fell, we expanded the segments incrementally – moving from engaged 10 days, to 15, to 20, and progressively wider. Each expansion was monitored before the next one was made. This controlled warm-up approach prevented the kind of sudden spike that had caused the original damage.
By early September, campaign open rates had recovered to approximately 49%. They continued to improve from there.
3. Flow Hygiene and Technical Fixes
While the campaign-level segmentation work was the primary lever for domain reputation recovery, the flows themselves had a range of technical issues that were contributing to the problem and limiting performance across the account.
The most significant was a filter error in the Payment Abandonment flow. A misconfigured flow filter was causing the majority of subscribers to skip Email 2 entirely – one of the highest-performing emails in the sequence. The fix was straightforward once identified, but it had been silently costing the brand significant revenue in missed recovery emails.
Across the full flow library, we made the following corrections and improvements:
These fixes did not just improve deliverability. They made every flow more likely to reach the inbox and more likely to convert once it got there.
4. Re-Engagement Strategy for Pre-Rebrand Subscribers
One of the larger strategic challenges was what to do with the subscribers who had been acquired under the old brand name and had not yet engaged since the switch. These contacts were not lost – they had opted in, they had purchased, they had a relationship with the brand – but re-engaging them carelessly before the domain reputation had recovered would have generated another wave of negative signals.
We held off on re-engaging suppressed profiles until the domain reputation had stabilised. Then we built a phased re-engagement approach, segmenting these subscribers by how recently they had been active before the rebrand: 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, and 120-180 days prior to the switch.
Each phase started with a smaller test send, monitored against strict thresholds for spam rate, bounce rate, and open rate before expanding. The messaging acknowledged the rebrand directly – explaining what had changed, what was new, and why they were hearing from us again – rather than sending them straight into a promotional campaign.
This phased approach meant the domain reputation was never put at risk by a bulk re-engagement push, and the most valuable pre-rebrand subscribers were recovered systematically rather than lost permanently.
5. Deliverability Testing and Monitoring
To validate the work and track progress with precision, we implemented GlockApp deliverability testing alongside Klaviyo’s native reporting tools.
The GlockApp inbox placement test returned a 94% combined inbox and tabs rate – confirming that the warm-up strategy was working and that emails were reaching the inbox rather than spam folders. The breakdown showed strong performance across AOL, Apple, Yahoo, Outlook, and Mail.com, with Gmail delivering almost entirely to the Promotions tab – expected for a promotional sender and not a deliverability concern in itself.
Monitoring moved to a weekly cadence, tracking channel-level performance to catch any shifts before they could compound into a larger problem – the same approach that would have prevented the original issue from becoming a crisis.
Within approximately 3 months of starting work, this account went from a deliverability crisis to a healthy, growing email programme.
The June bounce and unsubscribe rate spikes visible in the deliverability graph below tell the story clearly: a sharp, avoidable crisis caused by the rebrand, followed by a steady, controlled recovery that brought all core metrics back within healthy benchmarks and beyond.
For a brand operating at this scale – 764,000 active email profiles, over $20M in store revenue across a six month window – a deliverability crisis of this severity would have had compounding consequences if left unresolved. Every send to a damaged domain builds more negative history. Every negative signal makes the next send harder to recover from. Fixing it required moving fast, methodically, and with a clear understanding of exactly where the damage was concentrated.
1. Rebrands require a dedicated deliverability plan
Changing a domain or sender identity is one of the highest-risk events in email marketing. Every inbox provider treats a new domain as an unknown quantity. Without a deliberate warm-up strategy, the list built under the old identity becomes a liability rather than an asset.
2. Not all providers are equal – segment accordingly
The difference between Gmail at 16% open rates and other providers at 50%+ in the same account is not a content problem. It is a reputation problem specific to that provider. Treating the entire list the same way when providers are behaving differently is how a fixable issue becomes a structural one.
3. Flow hygiene directly affects deliverability
A misconfigured filter causing half your flow emails to be skipped is both a revenue leak and a deliverability signal. Clean flows mean cleaner sending patterns, better engagement rates, and fewer negative signals reaching inbox providers.
4. Re-engagement requires patience before speed
The instinct after a rebrand is to re-engage the list as quickly as possible. The correct approach is to wait until the domain reputation has recovered, then re-engage in phases with messaging that acknowledges the change and thresholds that protect the recovery already achieved.
5. Deliverability is measurable – and improvable
Domain reputation, inbox placement rates, spam complaint rates – these are not abstract metrics. They are measurable, they respond to specific interventions, and they directly impact how much revenue email generates. A Klaviyo deliverability score of 81 does not happen by accident.
The deliverability recovery was the foundation. With the domain reputation restored and engagement metrics healthy, the account is positioned to do significantly more.
Reactivating the suppressed list:
The brand has a large pool of suppressed contacts from the pre-rebrand period. With domain reputation now stable, a phased unsuppression plan – starting with the most recently engaged and expanding outward – represents a meaningful opportunity to recover high-value subscribers who were lost in the chaos of the rebrand rather than through genuine disengagement.
Expanding and deepening the flow library:
The current flows cover the core lifecycle moments but have significant room to grow. Priority additions include a Search Abandonment flow, Category View flow, expanded Loyalty flow, Tier Upgrade flows for Silver and Gold members, Anniversary flow, and Cross-Sell flows between jewelry categories. The loyalty programme has 67,993 members – a segment with strong engagement potential that is currently underleveraged in automation.
Zero-party data collection:
Adding preference questions to the signup form – jewelry type preferences, buying for self vs. gifting – and using the responses to personalise the Welcome Flow would allow the brand to deliver relevant product recommendations from the first email, improving both engagement and conversion rates from the top of the funnel.
Gmail Promotions tab strategy:
The GlockApp test confirmed that Gmail sends are landing in the Promotions tab rather than Primary. While this is expected for a promotional sender, experimenting with plain-text campaigns, reduced link counts, and whitelisting requests could gradually move a portion of Gmail sends into Primary – a meaningful engagement uplift given that Gmail represents a large share of the active list.
Scaling SMS:
The brand has 473,000 active phone numbers – a substantial SMS audience. With email deliverability now stable, a more structured SMS strategy running in parallel would allow both channels to work together rather than independently.
A deliverability crisis caused by a rebrand is one of the most damaging things that can happen to an email programme at scale. It compounds with every send, it is invisible to anyone not watching the right metrics, and it erodes the revenue contribution of email quietly but consistently.
For this personalized jewelry brand, the damage was real and measurable: open rates cut in half, spam rates ten times above Google’s recommended threshold, domain reputation classified as low. Left unaddressed, those signals would have become permanent.
Within three months, campaign open rates recovered from 24% to above 50%. Spam rates dropped from 0.5% to 0.009%. Domain reputation moved from low to high. Campaign revenue roughly doubled. The list that was causing damage was turned back into an asset.
Deliverability is not a mystery. It responds to precise, methodical work – and when it is fixed, the revenue impact is immediate.
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