The world of email marketing is in a constant state of flux, but a seismic shift has occurred. New sender requirements from giants like Google and Yahoo have moved long-standing best practices into the realm of hard-and-fast rules. For e-commerce brands, where email is a critical revenue channel, navigating this new landscape is not just important—it’s essential for survival and growth.
To demystify these changes and provide a clear path forward, Yotpo recently brought together a panel of industry experts to discuss the evolving state of email deliverability. Featuring insights from a high-growth brand, a data specialist, and a deliverability consultant, the conversation was packed with actionable advice for every marketer.
This post distills the key takeaways from that discussion, offering a comprehensive guide to strengthening your sending reputation, optimizing your strategy, and preparing for what’s next.
Watch the full webinar here for an even deeper dive into the conversation.
A Brand’s Story: Aviator Nation’s Journey to Strategic Sending
To ground the conversation in real-world experience, the panel kicked off with Curtis Ulrich, Director of E-commerce at the wildly popular California lifestyle brand, Aviator Nation. Their story is a perfect example of how a brand can successfully navigate major industry changes and come out stronger.
Like many brand operators, Curtis and his team were initially caught off guard by the wave of warnings about new sender requirements. “A lot of the notes about the DNS records and the DMARC, it sounded like gibberish, at least to me,” he admitted. For years, the brand had operated under the common assumption that you simply build an email and hit send. Their strategy was straightforward: “send it to everyone.”
The new rules from Google and Yahoo served as a critical wake-up call. With email being a massive revenue driver, inaction was not an option. This catalyst, combined with a migration to Yotpo’s email platform, forced a fundamental shift in their approach. The team had to move away from the “batch and blast” mentality and embrace a more strategic, segmented, and personalized strategy.
The process began with a hard look at their massive email list, which they had long worn as a “badge of honor.” For the first time, they performed serious list hygiene, cleaning out unengaged contacts and focusing on who was truly a healthy, active subscriber. They then leveraged the tools already at their disposal within the Yotpo ecosystem, like their Loyalty and Reviews programs, to identify their most engaged customer segments and create highly relevant campaigns tailored to them.
The results were transformative. By being forced to adopt best practices, Aviator Nation saw significant improvements in their email performance, proving that strategic, thoughtful sending isn’t just a defensive move to protect deliverability—it’s a powerful offensive strategy for driving revenue and engagement.
Mastering Your Migration: Key Deliverability Considerations
Aviator Nation’s experience highlights the importance of a thoughtful transition, whether you’re migrating to a new Email Service Provider (ESP) or simply overhauling your current program. The panel offered several key considerations for brands to prioritize.
Start with a Squeaky Clean List
Katie Intrater, VP at AtData, stressed that an ESP migration is the perfect opportunity to validate your entire database. “This will not only keep you on your ESP’s good side,” she explained, “but it will also help to make sure that you start your program off on the best foot possible.”
Don’t assume your previous provider has caught all the bad data. Over time, lists accumulate invalid, disposable, or even toxic email addresses like spam traps. Performing a comprehensive cleanup before a migration ensures you are building your new sending reputation on a clean foundation. Curtis echoed this, noting that for Aviator Nation, taking a hard look at their list and cleaning it up was the most critical first step. It’s an easy win that has an outsized impact.
Don’t Leave Your Engagement Data Behind
A common and costly mistake brands make during a migration is failing to bring over their legacy engagement data. Nick Koreck, CEO at 360inbox, called this practice “quite crazy,” as it means you are essentially starting your warm-up process blind.
To warm up a new sending infrastructure effectively, you need to know who your most engaged subscribers are. Nick recommends pulling at least 180 days of open and click data. If that’s not possible, even a simple timestamp of the last open or click is invaluable. This data allows you to start by sending to your most active users, signaling to mailbox providers that you are a legitimate sender that people want to hear from. He also clarified an important distinction: you need engagement with the email channel, not just purchase or loyalty activity. A frequent buyer who never opens your emails is not an engaged email subscriber.
Understand Your Audience and Their Origins
A successful migration—and a successful email program in general—depends on deeply understanding your audience. This goes beyond simple demographics. Nick emphasized the importance of data tagging to understand where your subscribers came from. For example, did they opt-in via a newsletter subscription form or during a transactional purchase? These cohorts will likely have different behaviors and expectations.
This level of understanding allows for more precise segmentation and targeting from day one. Curtis shared how Aviator Nation leveraged their existing Yotpo Loyalty and Reviews data to pinpoint segments they knew were active with the brand, giving them a powerful starting point for creating engaging campaigns during their migration.
The Top E-commerce Deliverability Challenges (And How to Solve Them)
While the new sender rules have brought deliverability to the forefront, e-commerce brands face a unique set of ongoing challenges. The panel identified the biggest hurdles and, more importantly, how to overcome them.
Challenge: The Technical Overwhelm
As Curtis mentioned, the technical jargon of deliverability—DMARC, DKIM, SPF, DNS—can be incredibly daunting for marketers who are juggling a million other responsibilities. The fear of the unknown often leads to paralysis.
The Solution: You don’t have to be a technical expert, but you do need to lean on those who are. “Lean into partners, like Yotpo, or the other panelists who are experts in this field,” Curtis advised. Your ESP’s support and deliverability teams are there to handle the heavy lifting of technical setup and authentication. Your job is to understand the “why” behind these requirements and to focus on the strategic elements you control, like your data and content.
Challenge: The Leaky Funnel and Bad Data
A surprising number of brands still fail to validate email addresses at the point of collection. “You really have to be diligent in protecting your email database proactively,” warned Katie. Pop-up forms and checkout pages are prime targets for bot attacks, typos, and fraudulent sign-ups.
The Solution: Proactive protection is far more effective than reactive cleanup. Implementing real-time email verification on all of your data collection forms is no longer a “nice-to-have.” It’s a fundamental practice that prevents bad data from ever entering your system, protecting you from high bounce rates, spam complaints, and potential blacklistings that can be difficult to recover from.
Challenge: The Chasm Between CRM and Deliverability
For too long, deliverability was seen as a separate, technical function, while CRM was focused on campaign strategy. Nick Koreck argued that this is one of the biggest challenges to overcome. “Deliverability and CRM are not really mutually exclusive,” he stated.
Poor data management, maintaining dozens of disparate lists, a lack of insight into lead traffic quality, and a failure to understand core customer behavior are all CRM issues that have a direct and massive impact on deliverability.
The Solution: Close the gap. Marketers need to understand that the core fundamentals of good CRM—contacting the right person, at the right time, with the right message—are the biggest drivers of deliverability. This means breaking down silos, reconciling data discrepancies between your ESP and your backend systems, and aligning with your paid marketing teams to ensure top-of-funnel traffic quality. As Nick put it, “understanding customer behavior and how users respond to your emails is a huge key there.”
The AI Revolution: Leveling the Playing Field in Email Marketing
No conversation is complete without discussing Artificial Intelligence. The panel explored how AI is poised to transform email marketing, moving it from a tool of mass communication to a medium of true one-to-one connection.
AI for Hyper-Personalization
The dream of a truly personalized message for every single customer is getting closer to reality. Curtis predicted that in the next few years, AI will “level the playing field,” giving even the smallest Shopify store the same sophisticated targeting capabilities as a Fortune 500 company. This includes everything from predictive send times to dynamically generated content and imagery that matches a user’s exact preferences.
Katie added a crucial caveat: “AI is only as good as the data that supports it.” To leverage AI effectively, you first need rich first-party data that tells you who your customer is. Is she a mother in a young family or a single man in the city? With that data, AI can work its magic, swapping out images and offers to make the exact same campaign feel deeply personal and relevant, which in turn drives the engagement that mailbox providers want to see.
AI and the Mailbox Providers
It’s also critical to remember that marketers aren’t the only ones using AI. Mailbox providers like Google have been using machine learning for years to power their spam filters. “Spam filtering is not going away,” Nick reminded the audience. As these AI-driven filters get more sophisticated, they raise the bar for everyone.
This forces senders to do more than the bare minimum. “If we’re using old-school marketing methods against new-school kind of filtering systems, there’s gonna be some friction there,” Nick explained. This evolution is ultimately a good thing—it rewards thoughtful senders and creates a better experience for consumers.
Your Actionable Checklist for Better Deliverability
Feeling overwhelmed? Don’t be. The panel provided a wealth of practical, actionable steps any brand can take to start improving their deliverability today.
- Start Small and Build Momentum: You don’t have to boil the ocean. “Start with list hygiene,” Curtis advised. “It’s a really easy win.” From there, build your campaigns incrementally with engagement in mind, track what works, and lean into those successes.
- Walk in Your Customer’s Shoes: Nick’s top tip is to periodically audit your own user journey. Sign up for your own newsletter on different forms. See where the email lands—inbox or spam? Is the “from” name correct? Does the journey meet your expectations? “You’d be surprised what you find,” he said.
- Use the Right Tools: You don’t have to work in the dark. Nick recommended using free tools like Google Postmaster Tools to get insights into your domain reputation and authentication status directly from Google. Paired with inbox placement testing tools, you can get a much clearer picture of your performance.
- Go Beyond the Open Rate: A non-opener isn’t always a lost cause. As Katie pointed out, many people have multiple email addresses. Are you sending to their preferred, primary inbox? Sometimes, simply asking a customer to confirm their contact information can turn a disengaged user into an active one. For those who are truly unengaged, test creative win-back campaigns with new subject lines and content before you let them go for good.
Looking Ahead: Predictions for the Future
So, what does the future hold? The panel wrapped up with their predictions for the next year and beyond, painting a picture of a smarter, more customer-centric email landscape.
- Personalization Becomes the Standard: The consensus was clear: hyper-personalization will move from a buzzword to a baseline expectation. Batch-and-blast campaigns will become increasingly ineffective.
- A Renewed Focus on Retention: With customer acquisition costs continuing to rise, the focus will shift dramatically toward retention and re-engagement. “Maintaining the customers that you have…is going to be the most cost-effective way to drive revenue,” said Katie.
- The Rise of Holistic, Cross-Channel CRM: Email won’t exist in a vacuum. Nick predicted that marketers will become much smarter about integrating signals from other channels. Is a user unengaged with email but active on SMS or in your app? This data will power a more dynamic, holistic communication strategy that knows when to push, when to pause, and when to pivot.
- The Unstoppable Evolution of AI: AI will continue its march across the entire ecosystem—from MarTech platforms and senders to the mailbox providers themselves. This will force marketers to continually evolve, leaving behind outdated practices and embracing more dynamic, thoughtful, and intentional strategies.
Conclusion: A Better Future for Marketers and Consumers
The message from the panel was resounding: the era of lazy email marketing is over. The changes of recent years have forced the industry to mature, closing the gap between technical deliverability and strategic CRM. While this can seem daunting, it’s ultimately a positive evolution.
These new rules are pushing brands to be better marketers—to know their customers more deeply, to respect their inboxes, and to deliver true value with every send. The brands that embrace this change won’t just survive; they will build stronger customer relationships, drive more revenue, and thrive in the inbox of tomorrow.
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