Ep 617: How to Fix a Pooched Email Account: 10 Steps to Recover DTC Deliverability [TWBERP Preview]

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0:30Jordan Gordon:The top 10 things you can do when you get an email account that's pooched, there's an inboxing problem, or the audience is totally checked out. Understand what was the thinking that got you into that situation, and what is the thinking that's going to have to get you out. When you're in the spam folder, you've got to clean house. Clean up your content. Send traffic to really clean URLs. Run huge email-only promotions. That's weird, right? Yeah, email only. Put less effort into designs and more effort into subject lines. That sounds weird, but let me explain.

1:10It's all killer, no filler. And today my parents are visiting, so we are previewing another episode of the world's best email and retention podcast with Jordan Gordon. And to preview it, I will tell you that if you run a D2C brand, your email account can quietly degrade to the point where a big chunk of your sends land in spam. and you never even notice. Jordan calls that a pooched account colloquially. And in this episode, he walks you through the 10 steps his team uses to recover one. We talk about why opens are going to mislead you, how to rewarm a list, and the metric that tells you it's actually working.

1:44And without further ado, here's Jordan on Twiburp. Hope you enjoyed it. Go subscribe right now on Twiburp if you haven't yet. Go send him a shout because if you are in the world of retention and email, this is the podcast for you. Thanks again, and I'll say hi to my parents for you.

2:00Jordan Gordon:It's the World's Best Email and Retention Podcast, and I'm your host, Jordan Gordon. We are a member of the DTC Network of Podcasts and the philosophical home of the Pallet Host Email and Customer Retention Team. If you want to make the sweet nectar of low-cost revenue a large part of your digital ecosystem, then follow us on your favorite podcast app today. This time, we are going to discuss the top 10 things you can do when you get an email account that's pooched. And if you're an email marketer who's listening to this, bless you, these are the kinds of things you would do if you suddenly get hired or suddenly get a client that's just got a totally pooched email account.

2:34Yeah, if you are a kind of brand owner and you really just drove your email account into

2:41Jordan Gordon:the ground trying to drive results, which can happen. And you know what? It starts happening around now in the business cycle, right? I talk about cycles a lot here. 2025 for us, what we saw, pretty solid. Unclear if 2026 will be as solid as 2025. There's all this stuff going on, you know, the straight-to-four moves, all that kind of stuff. So, you know, depending on what, I don't yet know how the year is going to pan out, but it could be a year where people are saying, hey, we need more, we need more. And that's when you push email, always. Anytime there's anything that's just not going right, email is the gas pedal.

3:22Jordan Gordon:Everyone pushes on. So you could, if you're a brand owner, end up with an email account that's pooched. And so, look, we do this stuff all day long. This is the kind of stuff that we work on. So I'm just going to give you a top 10 list that you can use at home while you're adventuring through your own DTC experience. Number one, set realistic expectations. So the thinking that got you into this situation is not going to get you out of this situation. Right? I have seen this and I've also lived this myself in my days as kind of just a day-to-day email marketer. We got to get results. We push on the gas pedal.

4:06Jordan Gordon:We get results, but the list shrinks. And then it's like, okay, awesome. We got those results. Now we need to get some more results on top of that. But the list is smaller. So now you've got to get even more relative results. So you push out those a little bit more relative results, but the list shrank even more, right? It's like, slow down, right? The first thing you should do when you get an account that's pooched is understand what was the thinking that got you into that situation, right? And what is the thinking that's going to have to get you out and first set realistic expectations. Think about someone going through physio because they've been in an accident or they've injured themselves.

4:52You cannot keep sprinting when you're going through physio, right?

4:57Jordan Gordon:So step one, just set realistic expectations of what you're going to do. Get buy-in from executives. Let them understand. Okay, look, and I mean, if we're talking about, we'll talk about rewarm and stuff like that, but like sometimes these things are, you know, hey, 30, 60 days, you can do a lot in 30, 60 days, right? You want to pick the right time of year to do it. If you were thinking about doing it, now is a great time, right? You don't want to be doing this in October at all, okay? So one, set realistic expectations. Two, optimize your pop-up and establish your list growth trend. Okay, the front door is the pop-up.

5:43Jordan Gordon:And what is a well-performing pop-up for a business that's a going concern, it's been around, you know, multiple years at least? Whatever your Shopify year-over-year traffic growth is, your pop-up impressions should be, you know, preferably up more year-over-year. That means your platform is outperforming your site. Your pop-up is outperforming your site as far as impressions. And then subsequent to that, you want your subscriber growth to be greater year-over-year than your Shopify traffic growth. So this is like our impressions and our ultimate subscribes are winning, right? That's what success looks like on this thing.

6:23Jordan Gordon:So establish that, make sure your pop-up is succeeding, and play with your rules until it is. And if it hasn't been managed, probably you can go in and change some rules and outperform your site. And then your list trend. And so just go into, look if you're a Klaviyo user, go into your main engagement list and just look at list growth. And look at the trend. Look if it's growing or shrinking, right? And important point, if your main engagement segment doesn't have Apple Privacy Opens excluded, go back to episodes one, two, and three of the World's Best Email and Retention podcast and wrap your head around why you need to exclude Apple Privacy Opens.

7:02Jordan Gordon:Now, the problem in this case, if you don't have them excluded, is the list just keeps growing forever. So you won't actually know if your list is shrinking. if you're like, if you're a list of people who will actually drive traffic, because you just have all this stuff, all this fat getting added, all this garbage getting added to the list and never getting cleaned out because they're false opens that keep triggering the segment. So, I mean, if you haven't done that yet and you've been listening to the podcast the whole time, shame on you. But regardless, if you make the change now, you're not going to know.

7:33Jordan Gordon:So you may or may not be able to establish your true list growth trend, but do the best you can. Anyway, pump the pop-up. Get some fresh stuff in there. Get some fresh blood. Get that coupon out there, right? Drive some upfront results. Number three, decide whether to rewarm or not. Critical decision, right? Generally speaking, when an account is quote-unquote pooched, there's an inboxing problem or the audience is totally checked out. It's generally one of the two. I mean, it could be that you've just driven your list into the ground like we just described. But I mean, if you drove your list into the ground, you had to do it sending so many campaigns that your list checks out, that your list is checked out.

8:20Jordan Gordon:So generally speaking, you're in the spam folder, people have checked out. That's usually a pooched account, right? So let's just say you've decided that you are in the spam folder. Indications of this, super low open rates and super low click-through rates. So if you've decided that you are in the spam folder, if that's what your analysis is, and if you want to figure that out, obviously go back and check out some deliverability episodes that we've had for some help there. But if you decided that, you know, yeah, I'm a spam folder, you need rewarm segments and, you know, 30-day click. And when you run 30-day click, it's going to be a really, really, really small segment, like super, super small.

8:59Jordan Gordon:But look, list size is one of the most misleading metrics in email. I have live seen a brand that we were rewarming. They had a list of 150 ,000. We rewarmed them on a list of 5 ,000 addresses and they were doing more revenue with the 5 ,000 addresses than they were doing with the 150 because they were so far in spam. So just if you're going to rewarm, decide if you're going to rewarm. If you're going to rewarm, if you're with Cladio, Cladio has people who can help you with this, all kinds of whatever center you're with, because people that can help you with this, but you want to, you know, it's going to be a couple months or something like that, you know, overall, and start with a small list and just slowly build on it and get back to healthy, healthy metrics.

9:41Jordan Gordon:And if you're not going to rewarm, you can do what we like to call soft rewarm, which is just make your segments super, super tight, right? Like maybe the open portions, only 30 days for true opens, remove all the Apple privacy crap. Four, yeah, establish your safe send size. Okay, so let's say you've rewarmed or you're not rewarming. I had just said, hey, you know, maybe open 30. I will repeat our research. I mean, I can't repeat this enough to the audience because it's just important and I love giving away good research for you guys because I love you. We studied events, engagement events that could trigger segmentation or flows in Klaviyo.

10:24Jordan Gordon:And in segmentation studies, we looked at open, active on site, viewed product, checkout started, and email click. We looked at those and the metric with the, and placed order, and the metric with the least predictability for future visits was open. Opens are garbage, right? So set your open really, really low and click and place order had the highest. And interestingly, checkout started was lower than we would have thought. Checkout started isn't really, checkout started without a purchase isn't actually that large of a predictor of a future visit. Great reason to have a checkout started flow to drive that visit, right?

11:05Jordan Gordon:Because they walked away and didn't buy. Anyway, set your open super low, set your click and play sort of super high, or not super high, you're doing a software warm. Set it, you know, higher than open and get a safe send size. And that's going to be where, I mean, your open rate, minimum 35 % for that. Minimum, 35%. If I see open rates operating below 40, I'm not happy. I'm saying to marketers like, what's going on here? Right? We generally operate in like a 50 % range, 50 plus percent. That's where we generally operate because we're super, we see opens as trash. And so we're super tight on opens.

11:47Jordan Gordon:Now we don't just walk away from those addresses. We have other systems in place. We have unengaged segments that we send to as well. We have flows that are set up to generate open so we don't just walk away from those addresses. But our workhorse segments treat opens like trash because they are. Just because someone opened, it's not a very good indicator they're going to visit and you want to have your core segmentation focused around people that are likely to drive traffic because no one's going to buy from your Shopify if they're not on your site. Five. Two campaigns per week. If you show up to us and we're like, oh, the average person on your list is getting 14 emails a month, and that's because you're sending 22 a month in total to different segments, it's not a good starting point.

12:38Jordan Gordon:So just reduce two per week, and then you can do a double tap if it really makes sense. Don't just double tap everything. Watch our episode on double taps. I think it's called Stop Doing This or Don't Do This or something like that. Sorry, I don't know the episode number, but I have an episode about double taps. So just double taps should not be to unengaged addresses. They should be to engaged addresses. You're trying to bring your engagement up. If you double tap to engaged addresses, like highly engaged addresses, it's actually going to increase your aggregate engagement because you're sending people who are likely to engage.

13:10Jordan Gordon:So yeah, it's two campaigns per week. Now, if you're one of these brands that's like, I'm sending, I was having this conversation in an audit and they're sending 24 campaigns a month and it's like a Staples brand. It's like undies. So that's a lot of campaigns for like an apparel staple. So what are you going to do if you stop sending all those campaigns? Automations, right? Build an automated system. This is unrelated to this pod, but I'll just say it. It's like, look, I see this all the time. Someone comes in, they get a quick little welcome flow, maybe a checkout abandoned, and then they just get dropped into the campaign system.

13:50Jordan Gordon:and the campaign system's like newness. So we sell red widgets. Mostly the first purchase is a red widget and then people usually follow up with a blue widget as their second purchase. And that's like 70 % of our business is red widget and then blue widget. So what happens? Our email system is like, hey, someone shows up and they're like, they buy a red widget. And then we drop them right after that into campaigns. And the campaigns are like, yeah, here's a really small green widget, right? And here's this, it's like a half a widget. you can add to your widget. It's like, well, wait a second. That stuff is really far down your catalog.

14:25Jordan Gordon:It's new. It's newness. But who's the person that needs newness to keep interacting with you, right? The person that needs newness to keep interacting with you is someone who's already been through your essentials. They've already got your core product. They've got the red widget and the blue widget, and maybe even a little blue widget to go with the regular blue widget. Now they need newness. That's what your campaigns are for. People's email programs are just like hope. They just hope and pray, generally, that the gap will be bridged between I bought the red widget to I need a small green widget.

14:59Jordan Gordon:Yeah, no, don't just pray. Build an email program that does that. And so less campaigns, get yourself to two campaigns a week and build rich flows that react to people's intent by selling them core products that match their profile. Okay? Six, put less effort into designs and more effort into subject lines. That sounds weird, but let me explain. So if you're worried that people aren't seeing your emails, because your account's pooched, right? Okay, well, it might mean that you're in spam often. I mean, and spam is not a binary. I'm in spam. I'm not in spam. It's more like 25 % of my messages are going to spam.

15:46Oh, right?

15:47Jordan Gordon:Like, ouch, 25 %? I see it all the time. Okay? We measure it. You can go back and check deliverability episodes for more information on that. Yeah, see that all the time. Let's say you're deep in spam. I mean, you're watching this. You're listening to this episode and you're like, whoa, this is the episode for me. My Klaviyo is pooched. Let's just say you're half in spam. Super common. That's why, why is everything sluggish? Because you're half in spam, okay? Well, then if you're putting all this effort into designs, I mean, half of that effort, you're throwing in the dustbin. You're just, you're wasting it because people aren't even seeing those emails.

16:22Jordan Gordon:So put the effort into subject lines. Subject lines are the most leverage you're going to get as far as content in your email program because like if you're optimizing something on the lower half of your email, most people don't see that. Everybody who sees the email sees the subject line, right? Everybody who interacts with that email by definition must have interacted with the subject line. So it's like maximum leverage, maximum visibility. And so you can, if you want to, if you want to improve clicks, you improve the subject line. That's going to improve clicks. And I've shown this, I've discussed this in the podcast, and it's just a truth.

17:03The largest effect on your email metrics

17:05Jordan Gordon:from subject line is revenue procession, right? Which seems weird because the subject line is the first thing and revenue procession is from purchase on the website. It's just the way it works. I've broken down my theories for that in past episodes. It's just the truth. So put that effort into the subject lines, get those opens and that engagement is going to help you with the inbox providers, with Gmail and with Yahoo, right? because Gmail's number one indicator for inboxing is engagement. The best thing you can do is have a larger share of the people that you're messaging engage. Clean up your email content.

17:46Jordan Gordon:So, yeah, go in there and put in alt tags, remove overly spammy language. Usually, you do not have to worry about things like overly spammy language, like sale and free, excessively promotional language. But when you're in the spam folder, you got a clean house, right? So clean up your content, right? Send traffic to really clean URLs. No weird stuff going on. No, oh, the thing redirects because we're doing this. No, no, send to a really clean destination like the home or a PDP, right? Something that loads fast. Home loads fast, PDP loads fast. You can look on our deliverability episodes from past.

18:27Jordan Gordon:And yeah, Gmail's clicking through and checking out. Gmail checks out what's going on behind your links as part of deciding if you should forward something. And consistency and send size matters. I realize this is like clean up your email content, but also just note consistency and send size does matter. So when I said establish your safe send size, establish that safe send size and stick to it. Okay? Eight, run huge email only promotions. that's weird right yeah email only so you want to get those clicks and opens so you go to your cfo or whatever and you say we need to run a really really really big sale that's not on the site it's only through email and we're going to give them a code and they can go and put the code and we'll give them a landing page that has the code or whatever whatever you're going to do how are you going to structure it digitally it's a it's an it's an offer that's only available to your email list, like a VIP of some kind, right?

19:28Jordan Gordon:And blow it out of the water. Make it as big as the CFO will let you make it. Because what you're going to get is this huge burst of email engagement. You're going to send multiple emails added to sale, right? I mean, I don't know why I made this one number eight. This should have been number four or something like that, right? You're going to get this huge burst of email engagement. And that's going to be part of healing you. Let me put it this way. Do not decide to, okay, we're going to put the effort into healing our email program. Do not make that decision and then go with some plain Jane, hey, look at the small green widget.

20:07Jordan Gordon:No, no, no, no, no. If red widgets are what people want and then the blue widget is a regular follow-up, you put red widgets and blue widgets 25 % off. that's what you're doing to heal this thing because you're going to get all that engagement that you need. Okay? Lean into SMS. So while email's down, you know, or down-ish, you've got SMS. And, I mean, mostly we just, SMS is just something we do for the client, right? It's part of our service for free. But in certain cases where we need to have a further level of consideration for SMS, the system is to treat it like a paid channel and establish a cost per click.

20:49Okay?

20:50Jordan Gordon:So you run a 60-day, 100-day, 360-day window, or 60, 93, 65, whatever, and you calculate the cost per click for those clicks. And then you take that and you compare it to what you're doing on the ad side. Right? And make sure that you are, you don't want to have a more expensive, you don't have a more expensive SMS click than an ads click. If that's the case, it's run an ad. Right? And the whole purpose of, not the whole, one of the main purposes of the email and SMS kind of retention system is it drives low-cost traffic and low-cost revenue. So establish your SMS cost per click. Because right now we're going to be leaning on email.

21:30Jordan Gordon:So now this is one of those situations where you want to do that and treat it like a channel, like its own kind of retargeting channel. And you might want to take that cost per click and compare it to your retargeting cost per click. Or if you have a post-purchase ads system that tries to make someone a repeat buyer within 30 days, you can check out something like episode 4 or something like that. Or in the first 10 episodes, we discussed it, how to structure that. Anyway, get that cost per click for SMS, establish it, and then sit on it. Just sit on it and drive as much as you can because you're going to be driving it from your previous buyers, right?

22:12Jordan Gordon:Which is going to be additive to what's happening in advertising. So you're still going to be getting the don't chase the same dollar system that is fundamental to making email retention work is you do not want to chase the same dollar that your advertising team is chasing because it's just like all the puppies rushing for the same dish when there's another dish right over there. And then 10. Okay, so you've done all this stuff. Get your metrics in order. Make sure that you are measuring the right things. And I can't even start to recommend which episode of the World's Best Email Retention podcast to go back to for this.

22:43Jordan Gordon:There are so many, right? We did do a good one recently, Email Metrics That Matter. And so that was not too long ago. I'd check it out and it actually went through some reporting you can set up in Klaviyo yourself. Shout out Klaviyo. We love Klaviyo. So track cents, clicks, Shopify revenue, and attributed email revenue. Okay. Sent and clicks. Well, weren't we just talking about open rate, click-through rate? Yes, we're talking about open rate, click-through rate. But ultimately, what are we trying to do with these programs? We're trying to get more people on the site. Okay? So track your sent and your clicks.