Numbers below are illustrative and representative of this engagement type. The subject is anonymized, and every figure sits inside published benchmark ranges.
The situation: 82% of mail reaching the inbox
The brand sent two or three campaigns a week through Klaviyo and treated that as the whole program. Email drove about 18% of revenue, below where a DTC skincare list of this size should land. The list held 38,000 subscribers, most acquired through a single pop-up, and almost none of them moved through an automated journey after signup.
Two problems sat underneath the flat revenue line. First, the flows that earn the most in ecommerce, abandoned-cart and post-purchase, were either off or running default templates nobody had touched. Second, a seed-list test put inbox placement at 82%, meaning close to one in five sends never reached a primary inbox. Spam complaints sat at 0.14%, above Gmail's 0.10% target, which kept dragging reputation down.
What the audit found: a 0.14% complaint rate
The first week was diagnosis, not sending. SPF and DKIM were present but DMARC sat at
p=none with no monitoring, so spoofed and forwarded mail counted against the
domain unchecked. List hygiene was the bigger issue. The pop-up fed a single segment with no
sunset policy, so unengaged addresses from two years back still received every campaign. That
pattern drove the 0.14% complaint rate and the 82% placement.
The flow gap was just as costly. The welcome series was a single email. There was no browse-abandon, no win-back, and the abandoned-cart flow returned $2.10 per recipient against a Klaviyo benchmark average of $3.65. In a recent rebuild of this kind, the abandoned-cart flow alone tends to recover more revenue than a month of broadcast campaigns once it is segmented and timed properly.
What we built: five flows in 90 days
The deliverability work came first, because sending more mail into an 82% placement rate only compounds the damage. We moved DMARC toward enforcement, set up a sunset policy to suppress addresses with no opens in 90 days, and rebuilt the signup segment so new subscribers entered a real journey instead of the general blast.
Then the flows. Over 90 days the team shipped five: a three-email welcome series with a first-order incentive, a segmented abandoned-cart flow split by cart value, a browse-abandon flow for product-page visitors, a post-purchase sequence covering education and replenishment timing, and a win-back flow for lapsed buyers before they hit the sunset list. Each flow was A/B tested on subject line and send delay rather than shipped on a guess.
You can see the detail of how these journeys are structured on the lifecycle automation service page, and the authentication and list-hygiene work mirrors the deliverability process.
The results: a 14-point lift in inbox placement
Ninety days after the deliverability fix and flow launch, a fresh GlockApps seed test put inbox placement at 96%, up from 82%. Spam complaints fell to 0.03%, well under Gmail's 0.10% target. With mail actually arriving, the flows could do their job, and email's revenue share climbed from 18% to 31%.
| Metric | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Email-attributed revenue share | 18% | 31% | +13 pts |
| Abandoned-cart flow RPR | $2.10 | $3.80 | +81% |
| Inbox placement (GlockApps) | 82% | 96% | +14 pts |
| Spam-complaint rate | 0.14% | 0.03% | -0.11 pts |
| Campaign CTOR | 6.1% | 9.4% | +3.3 pts |
The abandoned-cart flow moved from $2.10 to $3.80 per recipient, past the $3.65 Klaviyo benchmark average. Campaign CTOR rose from 6.1% to 9.4%, above the roughly 8.6% all-industry figure, because cleaner lists and better placement mean the people seeing each send are the ones who want it. These figures remain illustrative of the engagement, not a guaranteed outcome.
What it means for similar brands: fix the 18% first
A DTC list stuck near 18% revenue share usually has the same two gaps: missing flows and a placement problem nobody measured. Shipping more campaigns on top of an 82% inbox rate does not help, it teaches Gmail to file you under spam faster. The order matters. Authentication and list hygiene first, then the five flows that carry ecommerce revenue.
Across these rebuilds, the pattern holds: deliverability sets the ceiling and flows fill the room under it. If your email sits below 20% of revenue, the Growth retainer covers this exact scope, and you can compare it against the other results to see how the numbers move by sector.