How Buffy Fixed Email Deliverability and Drove Incremental Revenue With Tie

As ecommerce email programs scale, inbox placement quietly becomes harder to control. More emails land in Gmail’s Promotions tab, engagement softens, and revenue from existing flows becomes harder to unlock. At the same time, even strong SMS programs lose reach when opted-in subscribers appear anonymous on-site and never enter abandonment flows.

That’s where Buffy was stuck. Without clear visibility into inbox placement, the team couldn’t confidently scale sends or email their full list without risking further damage to the domain's reputation.

The brand turned to Tie, initially for visitor identification, and later to test Promo Tab Protection and domain warming to improve inbox placement and stabilise deliverability.

Within weeks, Buffy saw clear changes:

• Inbox placement improvement: Emails previously landing in Promotions shifted into the primary inbox, with inbox placement reaching 75%.
• Stabilised deliverability: Domain warming ran continuously in the background, supporting safe expansion to their full list.
• Expanded SMS recovery: Reconnecting opted-in Postscript subscribers increased abandoned browse and cart SMS reach by 30.3% and drove 11.2% higher revenue from SMS recovery flows.
• Incremental revenue lift: Promo Tab Protection flows generated nearly $60 000 in incremental revenue, with a 45% increase compared to flows without protection.

"With the promo tab A/B test, it became really clear that there's clear incremental value here."

Leo Wang, Cofounder of Buffy

About the brand

Buffy is a direct-to-consumer bedding brand focused on comfort-first, climate-conscious sleep products. The brand designs and sells pillows, sheets, comforters, and mattresses made using recycled and plant-based materials with a strong emphasis on temperature regulation and moisture control.

Challenge: Deliverability drift, promotions tab placement, and hidden revenue loss

Before expanding their use of Tie beyond visitor identification, Buffy faced a set of compounding constraints that made email performance harder to trust and scale.

The issue wasn’t traffic, content, or cadence. Instead, it was where emails were landing, and the lack of control over it.

1. A spotty deliverability history from years of ESP migrations

Over seven years, Buffy had migrated between multiple email service providers. Each transition introduced small but meaningful shifts in sender reputation, engagement baselines, and reporting consistency.

While none of these changes caused immediate failure, they created long-term uncertainty. Metrics looked different after each migration, making it difficult to establish a stable benchmark for inbox placement and engagement.

“It’s been a spotty past… the numbers always looked different after migrations.”

That inconsistency made it harder for the team to confidently answer whether performance changes were caused by strategy, tooling, or inbox placement itself.

2. Revenue trapped in Gmail’s Promotions tab

As deliverability drifted, a growing share of Buffy’s emails began landing in Gmail’s Promotions tab. Early deliverability checks showed that over 41% of emails were routed to Promotions, while only 33% reached the primary inbox.

The issue was visibility. When emails landed in Promotions, fewer subscribers saw them in real time. Engagement softened before the team could react, directly limiting the revenue potential of flows that were otherwise performing well.

That gap represented revenue that Buffy couldn’t reliably access, even though the audience and intent already existed.

3. Hesitation around emailing the full seven-year list

Buffy wanted to move beyond sending only to recently engaged subscribers. With a long customer history and a large list, there was clear upside in reactivating older profiles.

But without strong deliverability safeguards, expanding sends came with risk.

Emailing a seven-year historical list at scale could easily damage domain reputation, especially if inbox providers interpreted the increase in volume as low-quality or aggressive sending.

“We started emailing our entire list, and domain warming felt like the thing that made it safe to do.”

4. Limited SMS reach due to anonymous shoppers

Buffy’s SMS program, powered by Postscript, was already a strong revenue channel. But like most SMS programs, it relied on cookies, logged-in sessions, and consistent device usage to recognise shoppers on-site.

This meant that some subscribers appeared anonymous due to expired cookies, logged-out sessions, or browser changes. As a result, opted-in SMS subscribers were missing from browse and cart abandonment flows, limiting how many high-intent shoppers could be messaged.

This limited how many subscribed shoppers could be reached through SMS, even when intent was clear.

Solution: Stabilising deliverability and reclaiming inbox visibility

Buffy didn’t need a new email strategy or rebuilt flows. The team already had a mature lifecycle program in place. What they needed was infrastructure that made existing emails perform the way they were supposed to.

The solution focused on two goals:

1. Protect sender reputation while scaling sends
2. Move high-intent emails out of Gmail’s Promotions tab and into the inbox

Here’s what the process looked like:

1. Using domain warming to safely scale sending volume

Before expanding sends to their full list, Buffy implemented Tie’s domain warming as the base layer.

Domain warming ran continuously in the background, gradually building and maintaining sender reputation based on engagement signals. This allowed the team to increase volume without manual throttling or guesswork, even when emailing older subscribers.

With warming in place, Buffy could confidently email broader segments of their seven-year list without worrying about damaging their domain or triggering inbox penalties.

2. Shifting emails out of Gmail’s Promotions tab

With sending volume stabilised, Buffy addressed the larger bottleneck: inbox visibility.

The team activated Tie’s Promo Tab Protection across their lifecycle flows. Emails that previously landed in Gmail’s Promotions tab began routing to the primary inbox instead, without changing content, cadence, or flow logic.

“Promo Tab Protection has given us measurable and certain improvement in deliverability and revenue outcomes.”

3. Applying the solution across all lifecycle flows

After validating results through A/B testing, Buffy rolled Promo Tab Protection out across all lifecycle flows.

This standardised inbox placement improvements across the entire email program. The team didn’t need to manage exceptions or maintain separate logic for different flows.

Months later, the test was rerun to confirm durability and the uplift sustained. At that point, deliverability improvements stopped being an experiment and became part of how Buffy sent email.

“It quickly proved itself… It justified testing and became part of our stack.”

4. Extending identification into SMS with Postscript

Buffy’s SMS program, powered by Postscript, was already an important revenue channel. But identification across email and SMS wasn’t always aligned.

Some shoppers had opted into SMS but appeared anonymous on-site due to expired cookies, logged-out sessions, or device changes. That meant they couldn’t always be routed into browse and cart abandonment SMS flows, even when intent was clear.

By integrating Tie with Postscript, Buffy reconnected these shoppers to their existing SMS consent and made them eligible for abandonment messaging again.

This didn’t require any changes to SMS strategy, cadence, or creative. It simply increased the number of subscribed shoppers who could be recognised and messaged at the right moment.

Results: Measurable inbox placement gains and clear incremental revenue

After rolling out Promo Tab Protection and domain warming, Buffy saw immediate improvements in inbox placement, engagement, and revenue performance.

With stronger deliverability in place, the team was able to:

• Increase inbox placement to 75%, up from 33%, by shifting emails out of Gmail’s Promotions tab.
• Generate nearly $60 000 in incremental revenue within the first month from protected lifecycle flows.
• Drive 45% higher revenue in flows using Promo Tab Protection compared to unprotected flows.
• Improve engagement across lifecycle emails, with 19% higher open rates and 18% higher click rates.
• Confidently email their full seven-year list while protecting domain reputation.
• Increase SMS abandonment reach by 30.3%
• Drive 11.2% higher revenue from browse and cart abandonment SMS flows by reconnecting opted-in Postscript subscribers who previously appeared anonymous on-site.

“Promo Tab Protection has given us measurable and certain improvement in deliverability and revenue outcomes.”

Want to turn inbox placement into measurable revenue?

Most ecommerce brands invest heavily in building email lists and optimising flows, but a large share of those emails never reach the primary inbox. When messages land in Promotions, visibility drops, engagement softens, and revenue potential goes unrealised, even when the strategy and content are sound.

That’s why brands like Buffy made the shift.

With a platform like Tie, ecommerce teams can stabilise inbox placement, protect sender reputation, and unlock revenue from emails they’re already sending without rebuilding flows or changing creative.

If you’re looking to improve inbox visibility and get more out of your email program, Tie helps you:

• Shift emails out of Gmail’s Promotions tab and into the primary inbox.
• Protect sender reputation with continuous domain warming.
• Scale sends safely across your full list.
• Drive incremental revenue from existing lifecycle flows.

Book a demo today to see how Tie works.