Email Deliverability

Email Deliverability runs a structured audit of why your ecommerce emails are landing in spam, Gmail Promotions, or Updates instead of the primary inbox — and gives you a prioritized fix list. Deliverability is rarely one thing; it is a stack of authentication records, list quality, sending patterns, content signals, and recipient engagement working against each other. This skill walks the stack, flags what is broken, and tells you which fixes return the most inbox placement per hour of work.

Use when

• A Shopify, BigCommerce, or Klaviyo user reports that open rates have collapsed, that customers say "I never got the email," or that test sends are landing in spam on Gmail, Outlook, or Yahoo
• A brand is preparing to migrate from one ESP to another (Mailchimp to Klaviyo, Klaviyo to Sendlane, etc.) and wants a pre-migration deliverability checklist plus an IP and domain warm-up plan
• The user has just turned on Google and Yahoo's 2024 bulk-sender requirements and is unsure whether their SPF, DKIM, DMARC, one-click unsubscribe, and spam-complaint thresholds meet the new bar
• The user mentions "promotions tab," "spam folder," "sender reputation," "DMARC," "list hygiene," "engagement segmentation," "warm-up," or "bounces" in the context of marketing email and wants a complete diagnostic — not a single tip

What this skill does

The skill performs a layered audit across seven deliverability domains: domain authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC alignment), sending infrastructure (shared vs dedicated IP, subdomain strategy), list hygiene (bounce rates, role accounts, recycled spam traps), engagement signals (open and click decay, sunset policies), content and template (image-to-text ratio, link shorteners, spammy phrases, dark mode rendering), volume and cadence (warm-up curve, batch size, time-of-day variance), and reputation monitors (Google Postmaster, Microsoft SNDS, blocklists). For each domain it returns a status, the evidence the user should check in their ESP or DNS, and a fix.

Inputs required

• Sending domain and ESP (required): so the audit references the right DNS records and ESP-specific dashboards (Klaviyo, Mailchimp, Sendgrid, etc.)
• Recent campaign metrics (required): open rate, click rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate, spam-complaint rate for the last three to five sends
• List growth source (required): is the list grown from on-site signups, lead magnets, purchase data, lookalike imports, or paid lead-gen — origin drives risk profile
• Symptoms observed (required): primary inbox, Promotions, Spam, or "completely missing" — and on which providers
• Current authentication records (optional): pasted SPF, DKIM, and DMARC values speed up the audit
• Recent changes (optional): ESP migration, new sending domain, list import, large send to cold segment — these usually explain sudden drops

Output format

The deliverable is a deliverability audit report with a one-line verdict at the top (Healthy / At Risk / In Trouble) followed by a domain-by-domain table with status, evidence, and fix per domain. After the table the skill returns a 30-day remediation plan broken into "do today," "do this week," and "do this month," with each item tagged for difficulty (easy / medium / advanced) and expected impact on inbox placement. A monitoring section lists the three to five dashboards or tools the user should check weekly going forward — Google Postmaster, Microsoft SNDS, MXToolbox blacklist check, Klaviyo deliverability tab, and a seed-list testing tool — and what threshold should trigger an alert.

Scope

• Designed for: ecommerce email marketers, founders managing their own ESP, lifecycle marketers, and CRM operators
• Platform context: Klaviyo, Mailchimp, Omnisend, Sendlane, Postscript, Brevo, Sendgrid, and other ESPs commonly used by DTC brands
• Language: English

Limitations

• The audit reads the inputs you provide — it does not query your DNS, your ESP, or Google Postmaster directly, so the quality of the output depends on the accuracy of the data you paste in
• Does not provide legal advice on CAN-SPAM, GDPR, CASL, or other consent regimes; flags consent-related risks only
• Cannot guarantee inbox placement — it improves the structural and behavioral factors that influence reputation, but mailbox provider algorithms are opaque and recipient engagement remains the dominant signal