Email isn't dead. It's just being treated like a newsletter, and that's why so many of them get ignored. Laryssa Wirstiuk runs a boutique email and SMS agency and joins Matt Edmundson to explain what actually works in Klaviyo right now.
SummaryLaryssa Wirstiuk, founder of the Klaviyo-focused retention agency Joy Joya and host of the Marketing with Laryssa podcast, sits down with Matt to talk about the channel everyone underrates. Her core point is simple. Email is the owned list, the CRM, the lifecycle, the one place where people have actually opted in and want to hear from you. The two biggest mistakes brands make are not valuing it enough, and being so afraid of annoying people that they never send.
The conversation moves through the fears founders bring to email and why the numbers rarely justify them. Unsubscribe rates are almost never as high as owners imagine, and disengaged contacts harm deliverability, so letting them go is a gift, not a loss. Laryssa shares a client whose inherited list of around 20,000 was cut to roughly 1,500 genuinely engaged people to escape the spam folder and recover revenue. She and Matt dig into segmentation thresholds, list cleanup, the transactional emails most brands ignore, why simple content beats elaborate design, how to handle dark mode, and which metrics still tell the truth in a world of Apple Mail Privacy Protection and Gmail's AI summaries.
Email Is the One Channel People Actually Opted IntoLaryssa's definition cuts through the jargon. Unlike social ads, SEO or paid traffic, where people are effectively being shouted at, email and SMS reach people who have expressed interest and asked to hear from you. That changes the job entirely. The relationship is already there. The work is keeping it going. And because you own that list outright, unlike a rented social audience, the data and the relationship are yours to keep.
"Behind it all, it's just the owned list, the CRM, the lifecycle of it that I don't think is ever going to go away." - Laryssa Wirstiuk
The word "email" is what makes it feel unsexy, she says, but the mechanics underneath are as valuable as ever. The two mindset barriers she meets most often are brands that only half believe in it, and brands that believe in it but are terrified of bothering people.
Why the Unsubscribe Is Nothing to Fear (It Protects Your Deliverability)The fear of hitting send comes from a real place. It is easy to judge our customers by our own inbox habits and assume everyone will unsubscribe. Laryssa watches the actual numbers, and the reality is calmer than the anxiety.
"Most of the people on that list, they want to be there. And you know what, if they don't want to be, that's a good thing because they're just holding you down." - Laryssa Wirstiuk
Disengaged contacts who never open or click send a signal to inbox providers, Gmail chief among them, that your mail has no value. That is how good senders drift into spam folders, and it is slow to recover from. The distinction between spam and value is about intent. Spam is a concerted effort to exploit or harass. Value is styling tips, gift ideas, education, new arrivals, a full picture of what you offer. Frequency is managed with segmentation, not silence.
Clean the List, Even When It HurtsList cleanup is the scary phrase most of us resist, and it is one of the most important things we can do. Email addresses go stale, people stop checking inboxes, and dead weight drags down deliverability for everyone still engaged. The mechanic is a sunset flow as a last-chance effort, then suppress or archive.
"We cut it down, I want to say, to like 1,500 from 20,000. We basically started over and turned it around, got it out of spam, started getting revenue conversion rates back up." - Laryssa Wirstiuk
On segmentation, her rough thresholds are practical. It starts to matter once a brand is sending two to three times a week and the list is somewhere north of 10,000 to 15,000. Below that, a weekly send to the whole list is usually fine, minding the disengaged. Segment by engagement windows, 90, 180 and 365 days, blending email engagement, site activity, purchase activity and how new someone is to the list.
Simple Content, Sensible Design, Honest MetricsA recurring theme is that plainer wins. One idea, one desired action, and get the reader moving. Matt shares a rule from one of his own sites where no block of text ran longer than three lines, which lifted conversion, and the same discipline holds in email. Long-form only earns its place as a rare one-off, like a founder's annual update, and even then it has to stay customer-focused.
Two often-overlooked wins came up. Transactional emails, the order confirmation and shipping notification, are among the most-read messages a brand sends, yet most ship raw Shopify defaults or leave the shipping note to the courier. Branding them is a real opportunity. And Matt's own brands found their highest-grossing revenue emails are the ones announcing a new podcast episode, though only because they sit inside a wider mix rather than replacing the offers.
"There is sort of an art to that type of email too. You still have to make it customer-focused while sharing the information that you want to share about your brand." - Laryssa Wirstiuk
On design, the emerging best practice is a hybrid of plain text and HTML, so something still renders and delivers if part of it breaks. Image-based emails give the most brand control but must be sized and compressed. Always A/B test the fancy version against the simple one, and always test for dark mode, mobile and different devices before sending. Gmail now runs its own AI to summarise emails, so give it real text or strong alt text to read.
For metrics, open rate has become unreliable since Apple's Mail Privacy Protection auto-marks opens, so treat it as a trend signal only. Click rate is the honest measure of engagement, with two to three percent a healthy benchmark and anything under two worth fixing through CTA placement, contrast and layout. Revenue per recipient is a useful newer metric, and unsubscribe rate should sit under one percent.
The Unhinged StudyLaryssa signed up to the welcome offers of around 360 ecommerce brands across different verticals and logged exactly what happened after each opt-in.
"44% of this random sample did not send anything, even though it was promised to me." - Laryssa Wirstiuk
Roughly 12 percent went straight to spam. The lesson is to go back to basics. The welcome email or text is the single most important message in the whole programme, because it is the only moment a subscriber is genuinely waiting to hear from you. Nailing that first touchpoint matters more than chasing a fancier next level. She released the full findings as a free report.
Today's GuestLaryssa Wirstiuk is the founder of Joy Joya, a boutique email and SMS marketing agency specialising in Klaviyo and retention for product-based ecommerce brands. A former creative-writing instructor, she niched her agency from the jewellery industry into email and SMS marketing. The name is a nod to that origin, since "joya" means jewel in Spanish. She also hosts the Marketing with Laryssa podcast.
Find every episode, the show notes, blog posts and more at ecommerce-podcast.com.
Episode link: https://www.ecommerce-podcast.com/email-deliverability-for-ecommerce-brands-what-actually-works
