Why 'Spray and Pray' Email Is Dead (And What to Do Instead)

Most Shopify brands start their email marketing the same way: write one email, send it to everyone on the list, hope for the best. It's fast, it's simple, and in 2019 it worked well enough.

In 2025, it's the fastest path to the spam folder.

The email landscape has fundamentally changed. Gmail and Yahoo's 2024 sender requirements, Apple's Mail Privacy Protection, and increasingly sophisticated spam filtering mean that inbox providers are watching how your subscribers interact with your emails — and making delivery decisions based on those signals.

When you send the same email to your entire list, here's what actually happens. Your most engaged subscribers — the ones who open and click regularly — see the email and engage with it. That's fine. But the bulk of your list consists of people who haven't opened in 30, 60, 90 days or more. They ignore the email. Some mark it as spam. Gmail notices the pattern: a large percentage of recipients didn't engage, and a few actively complained. Your sender reputation takes a hit. Next time you send, Gmail delivers fewer emails to the Primary tab. More go to Promotions. Some go to spam. The cycle accelerates.

This isn't theoretical. We've audited dozens of Klaviyo accounts where brands were sending to their full list and watching open rates decline month over month — from 25% to 18% to 12%. By the time they reach out for help, the damage is significant and recovery takes weeks of disciplined sending.

The fix isn't sending less. It's sending smarter. The approach that replaced spray-and-pray is engagement-based segmentation — sending different volumes to different segments based on how recently they've interacted with your emails.

The core idea is straightforward. Subscribers who opened or clicked in the last 14 days are highly engaged. They want to hear from you. Send them 4-5 campaigns per week if you have the content. Subscribers who engaged in the last 30 days get 2-3 sends per week. Those in the 60-day window get 1-2 per week. The 90-day segment gets your absolute best content once a week, maximum. And anyone who hasn't engaged in 90+ days stops receiving campaigns entirely — they enter your sunset flow instead.

This approach feels counterintuitive. Sending to fewer people should mean less revenue, right? In practice, the opposite happens. When you stop sending to people who aren't engaging, your deliverability improves. Gmail sees higher engagement rates and rewards you with better inbox placement. The emails you do send reach more inboxes, get more opens, generate more clicks, and produce more revenue.

We've seen this pattern consistently across client accounts. One brand went from sending to their full 45,000-subscriber list with a 16% open rate to sending segmented campaigns to 28,000 engaged subscribers with a 38% open rate. Total revenue from email went up 40% despite reaching fewer people. The math works because reaching 28,000 real inboxes beats reaching 45,000 spam folders.

Building these segments in Klaviyo takes about 15 minutes. Create four segments based on the "Opened Email" or "Clicked Email" event with timeframes of 14, 30, 60, and 90 days. Use OR logic between opened and clicked — someone who clicked without technically "opening" is still engaged. Then create one more segment for 90+ days with no activity. That's your suppression segment for campaigns.

Once the segments exist, your campaign workflow changes. Instead of one send to everyone, you send to your most engaged segment first. This generates strong early engagement signals — high open rates, clicks, low complaints — that warm up the campaign in Gmail's eyes. Then you expand to broader segments in subsequent sends or resends.

The transition doesn't have to be dramatic. If you're currently sending to your full list, start by excluding the 90+ day unengaged segment from your next campaign. That alone will improve your metrics. Then gradually tighten your sending to match the engagement tiers. Within 2-4 weeks, you'll see measurable improvement in open rates, click rates, and likely revenue.

The brands that still treat email as a broadcast channel — one message, everyone hears it — are watching their deliverability erode while wondering why email "doesn't work." Email works. Spray and pray doesn't. The difference is whether you're willing to replace volume with precision.