A deliverability reset playbook: from spam folder to primary inbox in 30 days.
Authentication, IP warming, suppression hygiene, and complaint loops, in the order we run them to pull a sending reputation out of the gutter.
When open rates fall off a cliff, the first instinct is usually to blame the subject lines. Nine times out of ten it isn’t the copy. It’s that your mail is landing in spam, and nobody opens what they never see. Deliverability is an engineering problem with a fairly deterministic fix. Here’s the 30-day sequence we run when a client’s reputation has cratered.
Week 1: Authentication and the honest audit
Before changing anything, confirm the boring foundations are correct. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC must all align to the sending domain, and DMARC should be at least at p=quarantine with reporting on. A surprising number of “mystery” deliverability problems are just a DKIM key that was rotated on one system and never updated on another.
Then pull the real numbers. Postmaster tools (Google, Microsoft), your seed-list placement, and the complaint and bounce rates from the last 90 days. You cannot fix what you refuse to measure, and “our emails go to spam” is a feeling, not a diagnosis. Write down the starting placement rate; you’ll want the before and after.
Week 2: Suppression hygiene and list surgery
The fastest way to repair a reputation is to stop mailing the addresses that are hurting it. That means:
- Suppress hard bounces permanently, and anything that’s been inactive for 12+ months unless you have a deliberate win-back plan.
- Remove role accounts (
info@,sales@) and obvious spam traps from acquired or aged lists. - Verify your unsubscribe and complaint paths actually work end to end. A broken list-unsubscribe header turns annoyed users into “mark as spam” clicks, which is the single most damaging signal you can send.
This step feels like it’s shrinking your audience. It is. A smaller list that reaches the inbox beats a bigger one that reaches the spam folder every single time.
Week 3: Warm the reputation back up
You don’t flip mailing volume back on at full blast. You ramp it, leading with your most engaged segment: the people who opened or clicked in the last 30 days. Mailboxes treat engagement as the strongest positive signal, so your best subscribers are the ones who rebuild your standing.
Start small, increase volume gradually day over day, and widen the audience only as placement holds. If you’re on a dedicated IP, this warming is non-negotiable; on a shared IP you’re still warming the domain reputation, which now matters more than the IP anyway.
Week 4: Close the loop and lock it in
By now placement should be climbing. The last week is about making the gains durable:
- Enrol in feedback loops where they exist so complaints suppress automatically.
- Set up ongoing monitoring: a weekly seed test and a postmaster dashboard someone actually looks at.
- Re-segment around engagement so the system self-corrects: keep mailing the engaged often, the lapsed rarely, and the dead never.
A reputation reset isn’t a one-time heroic effort; it’s a habit you bake into the sending program. Do the 30 days once, keep the hygiene rules running, and you stop paying for a list you can’t reach.
