Protect deliverability

Deliverability is whether your mail reaches the inbox. It depends mostly on things outside the message itself. Authenticate your domain (SPF, DKIM, and a DMARC policy), send from a consistent address, warm up new volume gradually, and keep complaint rates under roughly 0.1%. If placement drops, reduce volume to your most engaged contacts and rebuild. Sending harder makes it worse. A frequent mistake is switching email tools or domains and sending the full list on day one, assuming volume is fine because the list is legitimate. Mailbox providers judge a new sending domain with no history skeptically regardless of how the list was built, and a large first send can trigger filtering that then affects every message after it. To decide how fast to ramp volume, watch your most engaged segment first — recent openers and clickers — and expand only as that group keeps responding well. If engagement drops as you widen the send, pause and go back to the smaller group rather than pushing forward hoping it recovers on its own. You can judge deliverability health by checking where test emails land across a few personal accounts, not just whether the send technically succeeded. Landing in the primary inbox across multiple providers is a good sign; landing in spam or promotions folders inconsistently signals a reputation problem worth investigating before it worsens. A consultancy once saw open rates fall sharply after adding a bulk newsletter tool without checking domain authentication. Mail was going out but landing almost entirely in spam. Setting up proper domain authentication and sending smaller, targeted batches to engaged contacts brought placement back within a few weeks.

Key takeaways

• Authenticate your domain (SPF, DKIM, and a DMARC policy), send from a consistent address, warm up new volume gradually, and keep complaint rates under roughly 0.1%.
• If placement drops, reduce volume to your most engaged contacts and rebuild.
• Engagement rebuilds reputation; volume without engagement deepens the problem.

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