Why Your Klaviyo Emails Are Landing in Spam

When email revenue drops, most people look at subject lines first. Subject lines matter, but they only matter for emails that reach the inbox. If your emails are landing in spam or promotions, no subject line will fix that.

The problem is that Klaviyo will not tell you this directly. It shows you 'Delivered,' which just means a mailbox provider accepted the email onto its servers. It says nothing about which folder it landed in.

"Delivered" is not the same as "inbox"

This is the gap that trips up most store owners. Your dashboard shows a 98% delivery rate and everything looks fine. Meanwhile a growing share of those 'delivered' emails are sitting in spam, where nobody opens them, nobody clicks them, and your open rate slowly drifts down for reasons that look mysterious.

You can check actual inbox placement with a seed test: send a campaign to a handful of Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook accounts you control and see where it lands. Google Postmaster Tools will also show you a domain reputation score if you send from a Gmail-hosted domain or route enough Gmail traffic.

The five most common causes

In order of how often we see them:

• Missing or misconfigured SPF, DKIM, or DMARC records at the DNS level
• A sudden spike in send volume or frequency without a warm-up period
• Sending regularly to subscribers who have not opened an email in 90+ days
• A list built partly on old imports, contests, or purchased data
• High complaint or bounce rates from a single recent campaign that damaged domain reputation

Fix the foundation before the flows

It is tempting to jump straight to rewriting flows when revenue is down. But if your emails are not reaching the inbox, a better welcome series will not save you. Deliverability problems compound: the more that lands in spam, the worse your engagement signals look, the more mailbox providers filter you, and the worse it gets.

The fix order that actually works: verify DNS authentication first, then clean up list hygiene and suppress the unengaged, then rebuild or improve flows. Doing it in the reverse order means optimizing content that most of your list will never see.

The shortcut

Checking DNS records manually means logging into your domain registrar and reading TXT records, which is not most people's idea of a good afternoon. FlowScore checks your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC setup automatically as part of a free audit and flags exactly what is missing or misconfigured.