Motherlove (motherlove.com) focuses on pre- and postnatal skin care—products for pregnancy, postpartum, and breastfeeding. Deliverability had deteriorated badly at Gmail: in seed-based inbox placement reporting, Gmail showed 0% inboxing (the “0%” reading reflected how severely placement was suppressed, not that zero individual messages ever arrived). Google domain reputation was stuck in the low range.
DNS records were mostly sound with room for small tweaks; the decisive lever was list and segment strategy. Mail was still reaching very disengaged cohorts—including segments that effectively targeted “not engaged” profiles. That tanks Gmail engagement signals, drags domain and sending IP reputation, and works against how Klaviyo routes traffic.
Starting in early April we shifted execution: prioritize ~90-day engaged recipients, stop bulk mailing to disengaged audiences, and keep only narrow, justified exceptions. Within roughly three weeks, placement reporting showed a clear inflection—spam complaints eased, Gmail click rates improved materially (on the order of ~2.1% in monitoring), and domain reputation moved from low through medium toward high.
On Gmail specifically, inbox placement in our monitoring went from 0% to 86.4% after those changes. We had mapped a subdomain migration as a fallback but paused it once engagement discipline produced this trajectory. Next steps: maintain momentum, monitor for a sustained stretch, then widen engagement segments carefully—without returning mail to prior disengaged volumes at scale.
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