The client
A gourmet food brand from Georgia, USA
Infusion Blends makes flavor-infused gourmet butters and premium extra virgin olive oils. The butters are all-natural dairy butters blended with herbs, spices and real fruit: savory flavors like Smokey Garlic, Cajun Delight and Amazing Rosemary, alongside sweeter ones such as Perfectly Peachy and Oh My Blueberry.
The challenge
A new domain is a fast track to the spam folder
Sending a large campaign straight from new infrastructure is the fastest way to get filtered. Gmail and Outlook read a sudden burst of volume from an unknown sender as bot-like activity. The likely outcome is bulk-folder placement or blacklisting, plus a bounce and spam profile that is slow and expensive to fix.
The goal was to keep bounce and spam rates stable while increasing volume gradually, so inbox providers would recognize the sender as legitimate before the full list was ever reached.
The approach
The warm-up plan
- Clean the list first. We ran the full subscriber database through a bulk verification tool and suppressed failed and undeliverable profiles, so the ramp only touched addresses likely to accept mail.
- Build and present the plan. We segmented verified subscribers by inbox provider (Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, Apple Mail and others), then mapped a nine-day schedule that increased volume gradually and spread each day’s sends evenly across providers. The plan was reviewed and aligned with the client.
- Create the campaign. We designed an on-brand promotional email based on the offers already live on the brand’s website and secured client approval before launch.
- Segment for the ramp. We built nine dedicated Klaviyo segments, one for each day of the schedule, so every send matched the plan exactly.
- Monitor daily. We tracked delivery, bounce, spam and unsubscribe rates every day of the ramp, watching for any signal to slow down.
The results
Volume scaled 133x while deliverability held
Daily send volume grew to 133x the Day 1 level over nine days, with no loss of deliverability. Delivery stayed between 95% and 100% every day, and spam complaints never rose above 0.2%.
Bounce rate by day
The only brief instability came on Day 2, when bounces peaked at 4.8%. List verification and gradual scaling brought the rate back down to around 1% as volume grew, with a low of 0.5% on Day 8.
The creative
One approved template, built from the brand’s own offers
The ramp ran on a single promotional email built from the promotions already live on the Infusion Blends website: a free shipping offer, a discount on individual bottles and the gourmet gift set.
The template used the brand’s existing look (serif wordmark, gold accents and product photography), so the warm-up ran on real, on-brand creative rather than a test send.
In closing
What the ramp built
The campaign also generated early sales, but revenue was not the point of the exercise. The main result is the sending reputation the domain now holds. From Day 4 onward, delivery stayed above 98%, while spam complaints and unsubscribes remained low and stable.
This matters because deliverability compounds. Inbox providers score a domain on its sending history, so every clean day of the ramp raised the ceiling for the next one. A domain blasted on Day 1 would most likely have been throttled or blacklisted. The gradual schedule instead gave Gmail, Outlook and the other providers a steady, predictable pattern to read positively. The list is cleaner too, since undeliverable profiles were suppressed before the first send went out.
With the domain warmed up and the list verified, Infusion Blends can move from one-off sends to a regular campaign cadence (promotions, product launches and automated flows) with predictable inbox placement and without undoing the reputation it just built.
