Cabot Creamery is an award-winning cheese and dairy-product collective who have been farmer-owned since 1919. Its email and SMS subscribers include some of the most loyal customers in the dairy aisle. As part of our ongoing partnership, the Barrel team rebuilt Cabot's lifecycle marketing strategy, moving away from frequent full-list sends toward a tiered approach based on how engaged each subscriber is.

Lifecycle marketing is the email and SMS messaging a brand sends based on where each customer is in their relationship with the brand, from first sign-up to repeat purchase. For Cabot, the first priority was making sure those messages reached the inbox at all. Since the start of our engagement, we’ve increased Cabot’s Klaviyo deliverability by 29%.

Why Deliverability Comes Before Content & Offers

Email deliverability is whether a brand's emails land in the inbox or get filtered to spam. Klaviyo, the email and SMS platform Cabot uses, tracks this with a deliverability score from 0 to 100. The score is based on the last 30 days of open rates, click rates, bounce rates, unsubscribe rates, and spam complaint rates.

Mailbox providers like Gmail and Outlook watch those same signals to decide where a sender's emails go. When the score slips, every campaign reaches fewer people, regardless of how good the subject line or offer is.

For Cabot, one of the biggest drags on the score was bounces. A bounce happens when an email can't be delivered, usually because the address is invalid or no longer active. Frequent full-list sends meant Cabot was repeatedly mailing addresses that had already failed, which told mailbox providers the list wasn't being maintained.

How We Rebuilt Cabot's Segmentation

We replaced frequent full-list sends with engagement tiers, so each campaign goes to the subscribers most likely to open it. Segmentation is the practice of splitting a subscriber list into smaller groups based on shared behavior or traits. For Cabot, the deciding trait is recent engagement.

The tiers follow one rule: content earns a bigger audience by proving it performs.

• Brand content goes to the core audience. Stories about Cabot's sustainability work and farmer-owned history go to the most engaged subscribers, who already care about the brand and are most likely to read them
• Proven content goes wider. When a send type has a track record, such as promotions, recipes, or new product launches, we expand it to less-engaged contacts
• Bad contacts stay out. New engagement criteria help us identify contacts who are unlikely to receive or open an email, and updated exclusion segments keep invalid and previously bounced profiles off every send

Exclusion segments combined with the new engagement criteria cut Cabot’s email bounce rate by 92% since the start of our lifecycle marketing engagement.

Applying the Same Approach to SMS

Cabot's SMS program had the same problem as email, with a higher cost attached. Frequent sends to the full SMS list were lowering engagement without bringing in enough revenue to cover what each message cost.

We applied the same tiered model to SMS and narrowed it further. Because brands pay per text, every SMS send now targets a tighter, more engaged segment, so more of the budget goes to subscribers likely to click and buy.

Impact & Results

Cabot's Klaviyo deliverability score increased 29%. The metrics behind the score moved with it:

• 92%↓ email bounce rate
• 50%↓ email campaign spam complaint rate
• 27%↓ email campaign unsubscribe rate

A recent routine promotion showed what the change looks like in a single send. Nothing about the offer was unusual, but its click rate came in about 82% above Cabot's 90-day campaign average, and its open rate was about 13% higher. The difference was who received it and whether it reached their inbox.

What CPG Brands Can Take From Cabot's Approach

We see the same pattern across CPG brands with large, long-standing lists: performance drops, and the first instinct is to change the creative or the offer. In our experience, the fix often sits upstream, in who receives each send.

• Check your score's factors before changing creative. If bounces or spam complaints are high, a better subject line won't solve the problem
• Match content to engagement. Send brand storytelling to the subscribers who already care, and save your widest sends for content with a proven track record
• Keep exclusion segments current. Invalid and previously bounced profiles should never make it into a campaign audience
• Treat SMS audience size as a budget decision. Every text costs money, so a smaller, more engaged SMS segment usually earns more per dollar than a full-list send

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is a Good Klaviyo Deliverability Score?

Klaviyo scores your account from 0 to 100 and labels each range. As an example, a score of 90 is rated Excellent. If your score is lower, switch to the Factors view in Klaviyo's Deliverability Hub to see which metric is pulling it down.

What Causes a High Email Bounce Rate?

Most bounces come from invalid, mistyped, or abandoned email addresses. The rate climbs when a brand keeps sending to its full list without excluding addresses that have already bounced. Exclusion segments for invalid and previously bounced profiles, paired with clear engagement criteria, are where we'd start.

Will Sending to Fewer Subscribers Lower My Revenue?

Usually not. Smaller sends to engaged subscribers tend to earn more per recipient than full-list sends.

How Long Does It Take to Improve Email Deliverability?

Expect gradual progress. Klaviyo's score reflects a rolling 30 days of data, so each improvement takes weeks to show up.

If you're planning your own segmentation changes, our segmentation framework for holiday email and our guide to personalization across email, SMS, push, and onsite are good next reads. You can also see how we helped Cabot build AI authority in a competitive category, or check out more of our work with Cabot Creamery.

Want to know what's holding your email and SMS performance back? Learn more about our retention marketing services or get in touch with our team.