If you're struggling with high bounce rates, unresponsive lists, and other email deliverability problems, you might be desperate for answers. The tech jargon coming up on your Google search isn't helping. And the answer you hear most often might be, "It's complicated. It depends."
It's true. Deliverability and IP reputation can change from day to day or even hour to hour—even when sending emails to the same list on the same platform. There's no silver bullet to "fix" overall deliverability because Email Service Providers (aka ESPs like Gmail and Outlook) are constantly changing the rules for what gets delivered and what skips the inbox.
Even your niche itself, along with your products or services, could impact your email marketing deliverability.
What happens after you click send?
A series of interrelated events—some out of your control, some out of Kajabi's control.
We'll walk you through the journey of an email in Kajabi: from the moment you draft your email, to the moment it reaches your recipient's inbox (if it does).
Consider this post a guided tour. Whenever a milestone is worth exploring, we'll get out of the bus together. Otherwise, we'll point it out and keep going.
1. You draft the email
Using the Kajabi Email editor, you control the design and text of the subject line, preview text, and body. Because subject lines and body content can affect deliverability, our smart system is evaluating both:
Our email subject line validation is checking for potential spam triggers as you're typing. If it detects a trigger, it will suggest exactly what to fix.
Our backend email spam service is evaluating your body content before sending. Any content that's especially egregious gets flagged and rejected from being sent. This happens very rarely.
2. You choose the audience
In the ideal scenario, you're sending emails only to the people who interact with them. The more your recipients open, click, reply, and forward your emails, the more solid your reputation will be.
Email list hygiene is all about maintaining a clean, high-quality list proactively. You can use Kajabi capabilities like requiring a double opt-in, as well as unsubscribing and removing inactive contacts and emails that are permanently bouncing. (Your email automatically includes an opt-out to comply with anti-spam laws.)
We have developed capabilities like email address validation that will automate more of these cleanup tactics.
3. You click send or schedule
This triggers a chain of events that's seemingly invisible. This includes packaging up your message and recipient list so it can be processed by Kajabi's servers.
4. Kajabi hands off your email
Our email delivery platform's cloud-based infrastructure scales with growing businesses and stands out from other ESPs because it's state-of-the-art. More than 150,000 companies worldwide—including Shopify, Slack, and Lyft—use our email delivery platform.
5. Kajabi divides broadcasts into batches
Using Lightning Broadcast technology, Kajabi splits emails going to big recipient lists into separate chunks of 1000 recipients each. This helps rapidly speed up email delivery.
6. What to expect after clicking Send
After you click Send, your broadcast enters a delivery queue. During this time:
The Sent and Delivered counters may show 0 for up to 15–30 minutes for smaller lists, and longer for broadcasts over 10,000 contacts.
The Edit button is locked while a send is in progress — this is expected and does not indicate an error.
If your broadcast still shows 0 delivered after 2 hours, contact Kajabi support for a backend queue check.
Why wasn't an email sent?
If a contact isn't receiving emails, they may be on Kajabi's suppression list due to a previous hard bounce. To check:
Go to Contacts and search for the email address.
If the contact shows Unsubscribed: Hard bounced, they've been suppressed.
When an email is sent to a contact and it hard bounces, this means the email failed to deliver to them (e.g., the email doesn't exist). If a contact consistently hard bounces on the same site within a 4-day period (at least twice) Kajabi automatically unsubscribes the email address from your Contacts tab.
Once a contact is marked as hard bounced, they can't be removed from suppression list for 6 months after the last hard bounce.
After 6 months, if you believe the email address is now valid, you can request the contact to email us at [email protected]. Kajabi's email compliance team will verify and, if eligible, remove the address from the suppression list.
Additionally, some emails may not deliver because we determined that the contact's email address is related to spam. If this happens, the contact will not show as hard bounced. Rather, the email will not be sent at all. If you believe an email address is classified as spam incorrectly, contact [email protected].
7. The email delivery platform devises a plan
Sophisticated technologies execute email delivery processes in ways that aren't always clear-cut. At Kajabi, we're working on implementing certain protocols like inbox placement, send time optimization, and various ways to warm up IP addresses.
Email throttling controls the number of emails sent to one ISP or remote server at one time. Without mechanisms to control how quickly emails get released, the emails are more likely to be flagged as spam.
Suppression lists are one of those many processes. If a recipient's address is invalid, the email will hard bounce every single time. Our email delivery platform will filter out those emails automatically by putting them on a suppression list.
8. The email goes out via Kajabi's dedicated IP addresses
At this point, we're at a bridge that connects the email message en route, the sending domain, and the sending IP address.
All Heroes get the benefit of reputable shared domains and shared IPs. If you're a business starting out or don't send high-volumes frequently, you can leverage Kajabi's elevated sender reputation.
If you would prefer to use your own Custom Email Domain, however, you can!
Custom domains and the kjbm subdomain
When you connect a custom email domain, Kajabi sends emails via a kjbm subdomain (e.g., kjbm.yourdomain.com) as the technical sending address. This is by design and cannot be changed.
What this means in practice:
The From name and From address your recipients see (e.g., Alex \<[email protected]>) are set in your Marketing Settings and appear correctly in most email clients.
The technical sending address shown in email headers or by some mail clients may display as [email protected] — this is normal and does not indicate a configuration problem.
For your custom domain to send successfully, make sure the kjbm subdomain's SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records are configured.
8. The email goes to the recipient's ESP
Your email broadcast will likely go to a handful or a dozen different ESPs depending on your list, e.g. Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, and other providers.
Note: What "Delivered" means in your analytics In Kajabi's email reports - Delivered means the recipient's email provider (ESP) accepted your message — not that it appeared in their inbox. After acceptance, the provider's spam filters, inbox rules, and native apps apply their own filtering (see §9–11 above).
If a recipient says they didn't receive an email your dashboard shows as delivered, ask them to:
Search all folders including Spam/Junk
Check for email rules or filters
Confirm the address matches exactly what Kajabi has on file
9. Spam detection systems evaluate the email
Every ESP has its own proprietary algorithm that's constantly analyzing incoming emails. Neverending changes to these search algorithms are inevitable as spammers discover loopholes and slip through spam filters.
At this stage, Kajabi and its users don't have much visibility of the ins and outs. We know that IP reputation plays a major role in the algorithm.
Consider the practically unlimited details about email that an ESP could potentially assess:
The ratio of images versus text
Previous engagement between the sender and specific recipient
Overall engagement from all recipients
The "reply to" address and how it relates to the source domain
Historical sending patterns
IP/domain reputation
Here's a quick roundup of the security checks to help ensure the sender is who they claim to be:
SPF: Sender Policy Framework checks the DNS record and prevents unauthorized sources from sending emails from your domain.
DKIM: DomainKeys Identified Mail uses public-key cryptography.
DMARC: Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance tells the receiver what to do if an email does not pass SPF or DKIM authentication.
10. Each ESP handles spam differently
One provider might hold spam in a junk mail folder. Another provider might give the message a spam header. And yet another provider might allow the recipient to block individual email addresses entirely.
11. Native apps respond differently
Whether your recipient is checking their email through a web browser or a native app like Apple Mail or Microsoft Outlook, the difference poses another variable. Native apps typically perform their own level of spam detection.
Bounces get automatically reported back to our email delivery platform and Kajabi, and ultimately back to you as the sender.
12. The recipient accesses the inbox
Assuming the email survives spam detection from the ESP and native app, it lands in the recipient's inbox. Now your recipient has control.
If the subject line is forgettable or undesirable, your recipient is more likely to scroll past or delete it. However your recipient responds, that data makes its way back to our email delivery platform and Kajabi.
Improve email deliverability
As complex as the process may seem, the journey no longer needs to be a total black box. Some variables may be out of your control, but the more informed you are, the smarter decisions you'll make.
What's the No. 1 thing you should do to improve email deliverability?
Clean up your email list. Contacts who don't engage with your emails risk your ability to reach everyone else.
If you're looking for more dos and don'ts of email marketing, go to our Sender Reputation Guide.
Note: Open rates are tracked via a pixel image loaded when your email is viewed. However, Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP), introduced in iOS 15, pre-loads images for Apple Mail users — causing those opens to register regardless of whether the email was actually read. This means open rates may appear artificially inflated on some lists, or inconsistently measured across sends. A low or fluctuating open rate is not necessarily a deliverability signal — click rates are a more reliable indicator of engagement.
If your email sending is suspended
If you see a message that your email sending has been suspended, it's typically related to a compliance or policy review. Here's what to do:
Check the email address associated with your Kajabi account for a notification explaining the reason.
Go to Marketing Settings and review any alerts or flags shown.
Reply directly to the email you received regarding the suspension. The support team can provide the specific reason and expected resolution timeline.
Suspension is almost always temporary and resolved once the compliance review is complete.