Playbook
The Klaviyo New-Sender Checklist: Get Set Up Right
Most Klaviyo accounts are built backwards. A brand connects Klaviyo, uploads its list, and fires off a campaign - before any of the infrastructure that makes email work is actually in place. What follows is usually a deliverability problem that takes months to undo. The setup decisions you make in week one follow you for the life of the account - here's how to make them in the right order. (This checklist reflects what Kaydence's team works through on behalf of clients. It's a done-for-you process, not a self-serve guide.)
Authenticate Your Domain First - Before Anything Else
Domain authentication - DKIM, SPF, and DMARC - tells inbox providers that you are who you say you are. Without it, you are sending as an unknown entity borrowing Klaviyo's reputation. That is not a great introduction. Every major inbox provider - Gmail, Yahoo, Apple Mail - now treats unauthenticated commercial email with suspicion, and several have tightened their requirements significantly.
Setting up authentication means adding DNS records at your domain registrar. It takes around twenty minutes if you have access to your DNS settings. The steps look like this: (1) Go to Klaviyo > Settings > Domains. (2) Copy the CNAME and TXT records Klaviyo provides. (3) Paste them into your registrar's DNS panel - Cloudflare, GoDaddy, Namecheap, or wherever your domain lives. (4) Return to Klaviyo and verify. Do this before a single email leaves the account.
Also decide early whether you are sending from your root domain (brand.com) or a subdomain (mail.brand.com). Sending from a dedicated subdomain is the cleaner approach - it isolates your email reputation from your root domain's web reputation, which matters if something ever goes wrong.
Warm the Domain, Not Just the IP
New sending domains have no reputation. Inbox providers have never seen mail from you before, and high volume from an unknown source reads as a red flag. Warming is the process of building that reputation gradually - starting with small send volumes to your most engaged subscribers and increasing over several weeks.
A rough ramp looks something like this: Week 1, send to a few hundred of your most recent engagers per day. Week 2, step up to a few thousand per day. Weeks 3 and 4, expand to your broader engaged segment and increase volume steadily. The exact numbers depend on your list size, but the principle is the same: let positive engagement signals accumulate before you widen the audience.
A lot of brands skip this because they have a promotional email they want to send right now. That urgency is understandable, but hitting a cold domain with a full list blast is one of the fastest ways to land in spam - and once you are in the spam folder, getting out requires real work. Start with your best subscribers and expand from there.
Segment Your List Before You Import
If you are migrating from another platform or uploading a list you have had for a while, do not treat everything as one audience. Old contacts, unengaged contacts, and contacts acquired without proper consent will all drag down your deliverability from day one.
- Contacts who have not engaged in a long time - suppress them before importing. You can attempt to re-engage them later through a careful winback sequence, but do not start by sending to them.
- Contacts without explicit opt-in - do not import them. Full stop. Klaviyo's terms require consent, and inbox providers measure spam complaint rates. Purchased lists and scraped contacts will generate complaints fast.
- Contacts from a previous platform - bring over engagement data where possible, tag them by source, and treat recent engagers separately from cold contacts.
- Transactional-only contacts - people who gave you an email at checkout but never opted into marketing. These need a re-permission or re-engagement approach, not a cold campaign.
Set Up Your Core Flows Before Your First Campaign
Campaigns are one-time sends you schedule. Flows are automated sequences triggered by behavior - welcome, abandoned cart, post-purchase, browse abandonment, winback. New accounts often focus entirely on campaigns and leave flows as a future project. That is backwards. Flows do the heavy lifting on revenue and they work around the clock without anyone touching them.
At minimum, get a welcome series and a basic abandoned cart sequence live before you start driving traffic to your signup form or sending campaigns. Someone joins your list and gets nothing - that is a missed first impression you cannot get back. Someone abandons a cart and gets no follow-up - that is revenue sitting on the table.
Configure Your Sending Profile and From Address
Your from name and from address are the first things a subscriber sees in their inbox. Most stores default to something generic like a no-reply address or just the brand name without much thought. A no-reply address signals that you do not want responses - which is a strange thing to signal when you are trying to build a relationship with a customer. Use a real address (or one that forwards to a real inbox), and make sure replies go somewhere a human can actually see them.
On from names, consistency matters more than most people realise. Swapping between 'Brand Name', 'First Name at Brand Name', and 'Brand Name Team' across different sends creates recognition problems. As a quick illustration: sending from noreply@brand.com one week and 'Sarah' the next trains subscribers not to recognise you. Pick one format - something like 'Brand Name' or 'hi@brand.com' used every single time - and stick to it across every send.
Check Your Suppression List and Consent Settings
Klaviyo tracks suppressed profiles - people who unsubscribed, bounced, or marked emails as spam. If you are migrating from another platform, import those suppressions into Klaviyo before you import your main list. Otherwise you risk emailing people who already told you they do not want to hear from you, which generates complaints and damages your sender reputation.
Also confirm that your Klaviyo signup forms and checkout integration are capturing consent correctly. In Klaviyo's settings, this means verifying that the email marketing consent field is connected and recording properly. Getting this wrong is not just a deliverability issue - it is a legal one, depending on where your customers are located.
Test Everything Before It Goes Live
Send test emails to multiple inboxes - Gmail, Yahoo, Apple Mail, and any others where your audience is concentrated. Check that images load, links work, the unsubscribe link is visible and functional, and the email renders correctly on mobile. Also check your plain-text version: in Klaviyo's email editor, toggle to the Plain Text tab at the top of the editor and review what was created automatically - remove any broken merge tags and reformat spacing before saving. A broken plain-text version is a small spam signal that adds up.
None of this is exciting work. It does not feel like marketing. But the brands that get email right start here, and the ones that struggle with deliverability and poor list quality almost always trace the problem back to a setup phase that moved too fast.
Where Kaydence Comes In
If your Klaviyo account is new - or you have been in the platform for a while but suspect the foundation is shaky - a fresh audit is the right starting point. Kaydence's team goes through the account, identifies what is missing or misconfigured, and builds out what needs to be built: our team reviews your authentication setup, builds out your flows, cleans up your list segmentation, and configures your sending profile - built out and ready before anything goes live. You own the Klaviyo account throughout. We do the work inside it, and you approve everything before it goes live.