How to Fix Emails Going to Spam FAST (2026 Klaviyo Deliverability Tutorial)

0:00If your emails are landing in spam, you're not unlucky. You're failing a few non-negotiables. In 2026, inboxes don't care about your pretty emails. They care about your list quality, positive engagement metrics, and overall sending reputation. In the next 20 minutes, I'll show you the fastest checklist to grow from spam jail to inbox without guessing. So, why would you listen to me? My name is Emil and I'm the founder of Magician. Over the last 7 years, we've helped more than 120 7 to 9 figure e-commerce brands scale the store with a profitable and reliable email system, generating them over $300 million in attributed revenue. And here's the

0:42truth. Deliverability is the most overlooked profit lever in email marketing. It's not subject lines. It's not design. It's not copy. If your emails don't reach the inbox, nothing else matters. So, let's fix it. So first, what deliverability actually means in 2026. So email deliverability is pretty simple. So it determines whether your emails land in the primary inbox, the promotion step or the spam folder as you can see over here. So this is like the basic setup that most people have nowadays in their Gmail inbox. So spam is obvious, but here's what most brands don't understand. Promotions is

1:21not the same as your primary inbox. Promotion step means that your email is technically delivered but visibility drops, revenue drops, clickthrough drops. People just check their promotion step less than the primary inbox and they go into it with like a different mindset. In the primary inbox, you expect more personal emails. The promotion step, you know what to expect, like promotions. So, not only should you try to get your emails out of the spam box, you should also try to stay away from the promotion step as much as possible, but here's the problem. In 2026, Gmail is aggressively filtering

2:01brand emails into the promotion step. So, there are a couple of deliverability updates in 2026 that are super important to know as an e-commerce brand doing email marketing. So, there are three big shifts you need to understand. First thing is that Gmail is way more aggressive with promotions filtering. So Gmail's AI is much better at detecting marketing intent. So if your subject line sounds like marketing, it's going to the promotion step. If it sounds like a brand blast, it's going to the promotion step. So if you want your email to land in the primary inbox, your emails must look like an email that you would send to a friend. So ask yourself

2:40this, would a friend send this subject line to another friend? If the answer is no, then Gmail is going to see that email as a promotional email and it will send it straight to the promotion tab. So, of course, you won't die in the promotion step. People will still check it out, but you will make less money. That's at least what we notice. So, the goal in 2026 is not just avoiding the spam box, it's maximizing the primary inbox placement. The second big shift we see in 2026 is that engagement is now the dominant ranking signal. So this is the biggest one honestly. So inbox providers like Gmail, they care about

3:18operates, click rates, reply rates, super important. Spam complaints and unsubscribe rates although less important. So replies are especially powerful. If people reply to your emails, Gmail sees it as real human interaction. If people ignore your emails or worse, mark them as spam, your placement drops. So, it's that simple. Deliverability in 2026 is an engagement game. So, that means if replies are super powerful, you should utilize that in your campaign strategy and in your flow strategy so people will reply to you. And a third big shift is Gmail's

3:55new AI inbox that's changing everything. So, in 2026, Gmail is rolling out deeper AI powered inbox organization. So, this isn't just about filtering into the primary inbox or the promotion tab anymore. Gmail's AI is now actively summarizing the emails, grouping messages, and deciding which emails deserve attention and which emails don't. Because obviously, people's inboxes are plotted with emails. And Gmail wants to help their end user with that with the help of AI. So, what does that mean for you as an eco brand sending emails? So if your email looks like generic marketing content, AI may collapse it into a summary instead of showing the actual email. It will group

4:37it with other promotions. So less attention for you or depprioritize it inside the inbox feed. So it will place it lower inside the inbox instead of on top. So again, it's not just about avoiding the spam box anymore. It's about earning attention in an AI curated inbox. And AI prioritize real engagement, replies, natural language, and sender trust. So if your emails feel automated and transactional, AI treats them like noise. And if your emails feel human and relevant, AI surfaces them. So this is why engagement is no longer just a metric. It's a ranking signal for your emails in people's inboxes. Before we go to the next point, I just wanted to

5:20mention I have a free email marketing course on my website that breaks down these exact systems in more detail. It's completely free and cuts out all the fluff. So, if you want to access it, check out the link in the description below. So, a quick diagnostic. Do you have a deliverability problem right now? So, if your open rates are consistently below, let's say the 30 to 35%, yes, you likely have an inbox placement issue. So healthy brands ascending to engage segments should see 50% open rate or even higher. If you're far below that then something is definitely wrong. But you don't want to guess. You want to use

5:58data for this. So how to check your email deliverability. So there are two options. The first option is clock apps. Clock apps is a tool that you can use where you can send a test campaign to their seed list and they will show you your inbox percentage placement, your promotions spam. So, how many of your emails are landing in the primary inbox, promotion step, or spam box. It will show you if you're on any block list. It will show you IP reput reputation. So, you basically want to check this out every single month. So, yeah, I'm a big fan of block apps. Uh you can even try

6:31out their free spam checker where you just send an email to this email and then you'll receive an email with like um yeah, the results of that specific email and where it's landing. So, plug apps definitely interesting to use. They also have like a paid option. We use this internally and I would definitely recommend to um use this as an ecom brand as well and check this out every single month to determine your inbox placement. So, if you do not want to use clock apps, there's also a second option and that's just to use Clavio. So, go to your last five campaigns that you sent in your Claio account and then go to the

7:07deliverability tab. Over here you can see all kinds of metrics like first of all you have your key deliverability metrics health. So things like your open rates, click rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate, spam complaint rate. Those are super important metrics to track and you basically want to see if you're heading into the right direction. Now underneath that you could also see the performance by inbox provider because it could be that your inbox placement is all good with Gmail but that with Hotmail and Outlook it's like terrible and then of course you want to act on that for like the Hotmail Outlook user. So definitely check out the

7:43performance by inbox provider as well in like your campaigns. Then you can also check the performance by country. So, same story. It could be that in the US your inbox placement is all good, but in like Canada, your inbox placement is like terrible. And then again, you want to act on that. So, for example, for Canadian people, you just want to send to a tighter segment for a while to like boost the engagement again. So, how to

8:06fix your email deliverability fast? Well, it just takes four simple steps. Let's get into it. We know it's possible to fix your deliverability if you use a good strategy. So here's an example from one of our clients who had a major deliverability issue before working with us. So their operates were sitting between the 20 to 25% which is like far below the ideal range as you can see over here 23 23 22 20 21 like terrible terrible open rates. But by implementing a solid email strategy, focusing on cleaning up their list, improving their email reputation, and adjusting their content and design, we were able to significantly boost their operates and

8:47get the deliverability back on track. So this shows that with the right approach, you can fix your deliverability and see much better results. As you can see over here, I would like operates of 50%, 56, 60, 51, 50, 51. So again, it's above that 50% threshold that we always recommend and use for our own clients as well as you can see. So with that being said, let's head into step number one, which is to fix your technical setup. So here's the reality. Your technical setup is rarely the main issue of your deliverability problems. But you do need to set it up correctly. So yeah, it's it's not going to make the biggest

9:26difference, but you do need to make sure that it's set up correctly in the first place. So the first step, make sure you have a branded selling domain. So set this up in your Clave account. It's mandatory. So check it out in your Clave account. So you go to your Clave account. You go to settings. You go to

9:41account. Then you hit domains over here. And then over here you will uh you want to add a branded email sending domain. This is a demo account. So that's why it's not here, but you can add a domain over here. You fill in your root domain and go through all the steps. you need to add some DNS records and in the end it will show that it's uh live and then you have a branded sending domain. So that's the first step of your technical setup. Check that you have a branded sending domain. And step two is to set up your default sender email address to be from the branded sending domain. So

10:13if your branded sending domain is magicianly.com, your default sender email address could be emilisle.com or john@magle.com as long as it ends with magicianly.com. Third step is to set up a demark record. So demark is usually the missing piece for a lot of ecom brands. So when we check the tech technical setup for ecom brands, this is usually the missing piece. So demar stands for domain message authentication reporting and conformance. And it's a protocol that uses SPF and DKIM to determine the authenticity of an email of giving domain owners the ability to protect their domain from unauthorized use. So yeah, there's a whole technical story behind it, but let's keep it

10:55simple. Just do this. You go to your DNS records, check if you have these uh records set up and if not, you want to act uh add this to your DNS records as a TXT record. So the name is underscore demark and you want to use this value and then you can click on this link and then you can check on multiple websites if you have a demark record that is fully functioning. So for example, clock apps. So for example, if we go to clock apps again in the top menu, they have some free tools over here. So they also have a demark checker. You enter your

11:26domain over here. You hit demark record check and then it will say if you have like a demark record or not. So pass nine not performed for. So this is all good. You have a demark record. And then a bonus for your technical setup. It's not mandatory, but I do recommend it for like eight and nine figure brands and sometimes even for seven figure ecom brands. So, BIMI uses your DNS settings to authenticate your visual brand identity in emails you send. So, this technology allows brands to control the logo used in inboxes when they send messages in order to build trust and brand recognition. In addition, Gmail

12:04appends a blue a blue check icon to senders who have completed verification. Um, Gmail, Yahoo, and certain versions of Apple support BMI. It costs around $1,500 uh every single year. And you can check out more info about this on biggroup.org. Uh so basically, it will show a logo next to your email and a blue check on some devices and obviously it makes you stand out from the crowd and um yeah, it helps with your deliverability and just in general to stand out. So um definitely recommended to check out. So this is the boring stuff. This is the technical setup, but yeah, you do need to have it. So step two, clean your

12:41email list. So I see this go wrong all the time. So email brands who are proud of the huge ass email list but only 10% of it is actually engaged. So it's not about a massive email list. It's about having a high quality engaged email list. So into to improve your email deliverability and to avoid spam folder. You need to stop sending emails unengaged subscribers. So, my advice is to simply get rid of them as soon as possible and to suppress them from your email list because otherwise you're just

13:12paying for unengaged email subscribers. So, besides fixing your email deliverability, you can also save a ton of money on your Clavio bill simply by cleaning your email list. So, here's how to do it in five simple steps. First of all, get rid of ungaged people of the last 180 days. So what someone has done opened email zero times last 90 days clicked email active on site uh in the last 180 days placed order zero times in the last 365 days and received email at least 10 times in the last 180 days and

13:42person can receive email marketing. Second segment get rid of people who didn't receive an email in the last year. So first active or created at least a year ago and person received email zero times in the last year as active on site zero times in the last year and person can still receive email marketing. Also a segment that you just simply want to get rid of. Then third segment get rid of people who didn't open any email from your site. So kind of similar to the previous one but a slight nuance. So first active or created at least a year ago received email zero times over all times. So they

14:14never received an email from your site, but they could still receive email marketing, but they've been on your list for over a year. So yeah, you cannot re-engage those people. So you just want to get rid of them. And then fourth segment, get rid of people who've marked your emails as spam. So has marked as spam at least once over all time and person can receive email marketing. And finally, last segment that you want to suppress, get rid of emails that have bounced. So bounce email four times where bounce type equals soft or bounce email at least once over all time where bounce type equals hard. There's a

14:44difference between soft bounces and hard bounces. Hard bounces means yeah that inbox yeah it's not simply not possible anymore to reach it. So after one time you want to get rid of those. Soft bounces means that temporarily there's an issue with the inbox where uh which leads to the fact that an email cannot be sent. Uh so we want to give them like four possibilities to try to reach that inbox. After four times there's probably a bigger issue. You don't want to send emails to them anymore because the bounce rate is super important for your email deliverability. So yeah after four times soft bounces you also want to get

15:17rid of them. So then finally you want to suppress them. So the way you can do that it's pretty simple. You go to your cla account, you make the segments, and then for example, if you want to get rid of mark as spam, we go to the three dots, hit suppress current members, and

15:32then you hit bulk suppress over here. And you do that for all the five flows that I just showed you. And then there are suppressed. Takes up around an hour or two, depending on how much people there are in those segments before Clavia updates it. Uh but after that, those people are suppressed from your email list. And once you've got uh cleaned your list, you've got rid of the fluff. So what's left are your engaged or at least somewhat engaged email subscribers. And by removing people who've marked your emails as spam or uh whose emails have bounced, you're no longer sending campaigns to those who hurt your email reputation extra. Like

16:07when you email people who've marked you as spam or if you email people with bounced emails, yeah, that really hurts your your email reputation. So this already sends a much better signal to inbox providers like Gmail and Outlook. So with a cleaner, more engaged list, inbox providers will see that your emails are wanted, which will boost your deliverability and increases the chances of landing in the primary inbox. Now, step three is to improve your email reputation. So now that your email list is cleaned, it's time to boost your email reputation. We want to break the cycle of low engagement, complaints, and landing in the spam folder. So to do

16:43that, we want to trick inbox providers into believing your subscribers love opening your emails. So how do we do that? Simply by only sending emails to your most engaged subscribers, those who consistently open and click your emails. So first of all, we want to create engaged segments. And you want to create engaged segments of 40 days, 30 days, 60

17:04days, and 90 days. So how do we do that? You go to your Clavia account. We're going to go to lists and segments. Going to hit create segment and we're going to call this engaged 14 days demo. Select the condition. Person can receive email marketing. Add condition and what someone has done has opened email at least once in the last 14 days. Then we're going to hit this clone icon and we're going to leave this at or and we're going to say clicked email at least once in the last 14 days. Going to clone it again. I'm going to say placed

17:35order at least once in the last 14 days. Checkout started at least once in the last 14 days or active on site at least once in the last 14 days. Then we're going to hit create segment. You go back to list and segments. You go to the segment you just made. Going to hit the three icons and going to hit clone. Hit continue. And now we're going to make the version for 30 days. And simply by

17:58adjusting those time frames. So 30 days. All of these settings. There we go. Hit clone segment. And you're going to repeat this process for your 60 days engage segment and your 90 days engage segment. So important. I always like to include website and email metrics in the engage segments. But if you have major spam issues right now, you can ignore the website metric. So the active on site check uh check out started and placed order uh for now and just focus on opened and clicked email. So that's an important nuance. I always like to include website metrics as well unless there are like major major major

18:31deliverability issues. So this is the game plan. So now we've built the segment, it's time to build a game plan for the upcoming weeks. So for the first two weeks, first of all, turn off all your flows except for the welcome series, post purchase, and the embedment series. So your site browse card and check out abandonment flow. Second step, you want to send three campaigns a week to only the 14 days engaged segment. And you want to do this for two weeks. So in total, you're going to send six emails to your 14 days engaged segments. After 2 weeks, you're going to open your ClaView account again and you will check

19:07the open rates of those six email campaigns. Did they go up to 50% or even higher rate? Then we're going to continue with the next step. If it's still lower than 50%, continue with six more emails to the 14 days engage segment for two more weeks. And if that doesn't fix it, remove the website activity from the engage segments and

19:26just purely focus on the email metrics. But let's say after those first six emails you operate is above 50%, now you want to send three campaigns a week again now to your 30 days engaged segment and do this for 2 weeks. So six emails to 30 days engaged. Then after two weeks you want to check your Claio account again. Check your six latest email campaigns. Check the operates. Did those stay around the 50%. You probably see a small decrease but is it still around the 50%? Great. If not, and if they're dropping underneath 50% again, continue for two more weeks with sending to 30 days engaged. But if they are

20:06still above 50%, now you can expand for 2 weeks to your 60 days engaged segment. So you go from 30 to 60 days. Again, we're going to repeat the process. We're going to do that for 2 weeks. Did the operate stay above 50%, now you can expand to 90 days. If not, stay at 60 days for two more weeks. And once you are at your 90 days engaged segment, this will be your main segment for the majority of your email campaigns. And you can also turn on all your flows again because now your email deliverability is much much better. And

20:37is your open rate going towards the 60%? You can continue the process and expand to even 120 days engage segments or 150 180 as long as your open rates are above the 50%. But still for the majority of your email sends I would still recommend to keep it at your 90 days engage segment. So that's the game plan and then we go to the next step which is to adapt your email structure for Gemini AI. So this is important. Historically we've used imagebased emails for conversion and it still works don't get me wrong but in 2026 you cannot rely on image only emails anymore. Gemini Gmail's AI system they need text

21:18context. So if your email is one giant image with barely any live text, Gmail's AI system has less to um yeah read inside your emails. So here are some updates that we are making within our own agency right now. All text first of all, they are super important again. So the all text of an image inside your Clave account should clearly describe the image. So when you have an image inside your campaign, let's open a draft. Let's open this one. You have the all text over here, which should be a brief description of your image. Make sure that let's say this is an image of someone eating a pizza, a person eating

22:01pizza. Now, Gemini knows what this is about. Let's say inside your image, you have you're showing a discount. Make sure that the discount is in the alt text of 50% off. Use code blah blah 15. So make sure that your alt text is describing what's inside the image so Gemini can read it. Another important thing is to use Clavio's product blocks instead of design product blocks. So of course though you can still use design product blocks but we going to transition more and more towards Clavio's product blocks since that helps with reading which products that you're actually showing since that's like live real text. So super important. Then also

22:42use live top bars for your offers. So, no more images. So, some emails we like to have top bars that reminds them of a discount, for example. And before this was an image, but now we're going to use more live top bars with real text inside it. Same for the food area. Use live text in the food area, for links to product categories, for a loyalty status, for a store locator, for support info. Make sure that this is all with live text and not with images. So, these are all updates to make sure that Gemini AI can understand your emails better, which will give you an advantage and

23:14will be the new standard in the new AI inbox era. And we also include plain text emails regularly because this keeps the AI readability high, the engagement is strong, and its deliverability safe. You don't need to abandon design completely, don't get me wrong. You just need to make sure that AI can understand your email without reading the images. So KPIs to hit in 2026 open rate you want to go for at least at least 45% minimum but ideally you want to have it like 50% or higher. Click rate you want to go for.5% or higher. So no you do not need 1% or higher unless you want less

23:52revenue. I know Clavio recommends like 1% or even 1.2%. I think it's nonsense because that means that you have to send to really tight segments. That's not what you want. So 0.5 is all good. Spam complaint rate. You want to have that 001% or lower. Spam complaint rate super important to monitor. Unsubscribe rate. You want to have that.3% or lower. Uh unsubscribe rate is not as important as it was because um yeah, higher unsubscribe rates don't directly hurt your deliverability and they're less important nowadays since Gmail's one-click unsubscribe feature. So inside on the top of an email, people can directly unsubscribe. Because of that, unsubscribe rate has have gone up. Uh so

24:32that's why it's like less important nowadays. But of course you do want to minimize the amount of unsubscribes since it will cost you revenue in the long term because yeah you will simply have a smaller email list if more people are unsubscribing. So these are like main KPIs that you want to hit in 2026. Now always keep this in mind. So inbox providers like Gmail and Outlook, they only care about one thing, giving their users the best possible experience. They don't care about your brand, only care about their users. So, they just look at how your email subscribers are responding to your emails. So, are they

25:08opening your emails? Are they clicking in your emails? Are they replying to your emails? Or are they ignoring your emails? Are they sending your emails to spam? Are they unsubscribing from your emails? So, guess what? The secret to a good email deliverability is making sure the majority of your audience will do the first three things and not the last three things. It's that simple. So, how to improve your engagement fast? Send better emails, not prettier emails. So, that means use conversational subject lines. Skip long emails and use shorter border copy. Optimize your above default sections. So, the first thing that people see when they open your emails

25:45without having to scroll, that's your above default section. You want to optimize this as crazy because this is like where after that 99% of people they skip out on it. They only see your above default section. So big call to action buttons will improve your click rates by having that in the above default section. And less promotion. So not sent

26:04in promotional email every single week. And one to three plain text emails per month. Looks like it's coming from a friend so it lands in the primary inbox which is good. And optimize your footer. So include product categories. This will guaranteed give you higher click rates. And when you share products in your emails, share max three to five products. For example, in a twox2 grid

26:24and give each product a shop now button. Really important. Make it as easy as possible for people to understand and click. And always end this section with a shop all button. Or if people don't like the products in there, there's a um shop all button. So people will still click and go to your website. So you really want to start creating emails that people like to open. Focus on what your subscribers want, not just on what you want to sell to them. If Gmail notices that people enjoy opening your emails, they will reward you by placing your messages in the primary inbox. It's really that simple. Email

26:58deliverability, it's not like a super hard thing. Just think about the user experience. When people like your emails, your email reputation will improve, your deliverability will go up. So, in the end, email deliverability is quite simple. Just create fun emails people like to open. Now, this will get you out of spam fast. But here's the problem. Deliverability isn't a one-time fix. If your list hygiene, segmentation, and sending strategy are messy, you'll end up right back in spam in a few weeks time. So, if you want my team to set this up properly and protect your inbox placement while increasing your revenue, we can build and manage your full

27:37backend email system. So, book a free strategy call using the first link in the description below and watch this video next where I show you why most ecom brands fail at email marketing and how top brands fix it. This is exactly what we implement for clients at meaningful retention revenue within just 60 days without relying on more ad spend. So I see you over