383 - Your Klaviyo Account Might Need a Domain Warmup Right Now
Release Date: 05/24/2026
Marketing With Laryssa
Get the FREE "Front Door" Report: Right now, roughly a third of your subscribers are opening your emails in dark mode. On some lists it's closer to 40%. And depending on how your emails were built, that could mean your logo is invisible, your text is unreadable, or your email just looks like something went terribly wrong. The worst part is you'd never know - because if you're testing in light mode on desktop, everything looks fine. It's only when you flip to dark mode that you see what a chunk of your audience is actually looking at every time you hit send. Dark mode isn't an edge case...
info_outlineMarketing With Laryssa
Cody Cessna almost didn't do email marketing at all. He told me straight up he didn't want to be the brand that annoys people and gets unsubscribed. And honestly, that instinct made our job harder - because we had to build in more restraint and intention than we might have with another brand. But he came around, and it's actually paying off. Cody is the founder of COE, a brand built for the active and working man who needs eyewear that can handle the job site without looking terrible doing it. He spent years as a lineman touching 16,000 volts every day, wearing safety glasses that were ugly...
info_outlineMarketing With Laryssa
📥 Download the FREE Front Door Study: I subscribed to 362 real ecommerce brands - jewelry, fashion, beauty, home, wellness, accessories - using fresh email addresses and phone numbers I'd never used before. I just wanted to know what actually happens after you hand over your contact information. Not what a Klaviyo dashboard says is happening. What actually shows up in the inbox. Nearly half of them never sent a welcome email at all. That means 158 brands took someone's email address, made them a promise - usually a discount or incentive - and then went completely silent. And SMS had the...
info_outlineMarketing With Laryssa
Every SMS marketing platform is pushing something called RCS right now, telling you it's the future of texting your customers. And the upgrade is real - but the pitch is leaving out a few things worth knowing before you make any decisions. RCS, which stands for Rich Communication Services, isn't actually new technology. It was standardized back in 2007. The reason everyone is suddenly talking about it in 2026 is that Apple only added support for it in iOS 18, which came out in fall 2024. Once iPhone users were covered, rich messaging across both major platforms became possible for the first...
info_outlineMarketing With Laryssa
390Julie Cole said something in our conversation that I haven't stopped thinking about. Social media, content, followers - all of it can disappear tomorrow. The only thing she actually owns is her email list. Julie is the co-founder of Mabel's Labels, the brand behind those indestructible labels you've seen on kids' water bottles and lunchboxes - the ones that survive the dishwasher, the microwave, and everything in between. She started the company 23 years ago in her sister's basement with three co-founders, none of them technical, trading a foosball table for their first website. It's since...
info_outlineMarketing With Laryssa
Klaviyo has been rolling out something called Composer in beta - an AI agent that promises to build entire marketing campaigns from a single prompt. Audience, copy, design, segmentation, all of it. The promise is impressive. So I got access on a real client account and tested it myself. And my honest take is more nuanced than the hype - and more useful than the skeptics would have you believe. The short version: Composer is less an autonomous agent and more a really well-informed assistant. It knows your account data better than any outside AI tool could. It just still needs you. Where it...
info_outlineMarketing With Laryssa
$6,000 in Klaviyo. $600 in Google Analytics. Same campaign. Same week. Real numbers from a real account my team took over. If you've ever stared at two reports that should say the same thing and thought - is someone lying to me? - this episode is for you. Nobody is lying. But what's actually happening is something every ecommerce brand sending marketing emails needs to understand. Those two tools aren't giving you different answers because one of them is wrong. They're giving you different answers because they're asking completely different questions. Klaviyo is asking how much did the...
info_outlineMarketing With Laryssa
The moment someone signs up for your emails is the highest attention moment you will ever have with that subscriber. They just said yes. They're interested. They're engaged. And most brands are using that window to send two, maybe three emails - and then calling it done. That's a problem. Because the subscribers who buy from email one were already close to purchasing anyway. The discount and the timing just pushed them over the edge. The rest of your welcome series exists for everyone who wasn't ready yet - the people who need more trust, more context, more touchpoints - and that group is...
info_outlineMarketing With Laryssa
Segmentation sounds like the answer to everything. The right message to the right person at the right time - that's the dream. And to be clear, I'm a segment stan. Smart segmentation is one of the most powerful things you can do for your email program. But the conversation around it is almost always one-directional: more segments, more targeting, more personalization. And at a certain point, that stops being true. I see brands build 12, 20, who even knows how many segments - and end up spending more time managing those segments than actually sending good campaigns. The result is a...
info_outlineMarketing With Laryssa
The call to action is the last thing someone reads before they click - or don't. And for something that important, it gets surprisingly little strategic thought in most email programs. What I see instead is one of two extremes. Either the CTA is completely ignored - "Shop Now" slapped on every button, same wording across every email, no thought given to whether it's actually doing its job. Or it's wildly overthought - someone spent 20 minutes trying to make the button sound clever and ended up with copy that nobody instantly understands. Both are a problem. And the fix is simpler than most...
info_outlineMost brands have heard of domain warmup. When you're setting up a new Klaviyo account, you don't just blast your entire list on day one - you start small, build gradually, and let inbox providers get to know you as a sender. That part tends to make sense to people.
What doesn't get talked about nearly enough is what comes after that. Warmup isn't a one-time thing you do at the beginning and then forget about. It's a tool you can come back to - and for a lot of brands, it's something their account needs right now and they don't even know it.
If your open rates have been sliding for months, if your deliverability feels off, or if you've just done a major list clean, a proper warmup might be exactly how you course correct. Because the conditions in your account today are not the same as when you first set it up - and acting like nothing has changed is how deliverability problems get worse without anyone noticing.
This episode is also the natural follow-up to last week's conversation about list health. Cleaning your list resets your audience. A warmup is how you rebuild your sender reputation on top of that cleaner foundation. One without the other is only half the fix.
In this episode, I walk through how to know if your account needs a warmup, what the process actually looks like in practice, and the biggest mistake brands make when they try to do it themselves.
✨ In this episode, you'll learn:
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Why domain warmup isn't just for new accounts - and when to come back to it
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The open rate number that signals something is genuinely wrong with your deliverability
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Why you should always check your authentication settings before starting a warmup
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What DKIM, SPF, and DMARC records are and why they matter for your sender reputation
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What a phased warmup actually looks like inside Klaviyo, step by step
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What to watch between each send and when to pause before moving forward
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The biggest mistake brands make when running a warmup (and why patience is the whole point)
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Why list health and domain warmup go hand in hand - and why doing one without the other isn't enough
Warmup isn't a one-time credential you earn and keep forever. It's more like ongoing maintenance - and it's a lot easier to be proactive about than reactive about.
Work with Joy Joya: https://joyjoya.com