Email Marketing & Deliverability
A newsletter that had stopped reaching Gmail entirely
A 96,000-address list, a domain with no DMARC record, and campaigns being rejected outright rather than filtered to spam.
- Client
- Multi-site homeware retailer
- Sector
- Retail & e-commerce
- Year
- 2026
- Service
- Email Marketing & Deliverability
- 11% → 94%
- Inbox placement at Gmail
- 0.42% → 0.06%
- Complaint rate
- 31%
- List removed as unengaged
Engagement
Stack involved
- Brevo
- Amazon SES
- DMARC
- Postmaster Tools
- GA4
The situation
Weekly campaigns had been sending from the primary trading domain with SPF only, no DKIM alignment and no DMARC record. After the bulk-sender rules moved from filtering to hard rejection, Gmail began returning 550 errors and the campaigns simply never arrived — while order confirmations from the same domain started to wobble too. The list had not been cleaned in four years and complaint rates were well above the 0.3% enforcement ceiling.
What we did
- 01
Split sending across subdomains so marketing, transactional and outbound could no longer damage one another’s reputation.
- 02
SPF corrected, DKIM signing enabled, and DMARC introduced at p=none, then moved through quarantine to reject once the aggregate reports were clean.
- 03
One-click List-Unsubscribe headers added, and the unsubscribe path fixed so it actually processed on first click.
- 04
List hygiene: 31% of addresses removed as unengaged or invalid, then a re-permission campaign to the remainder rather than a silent resend.
- 05
Domain and IP warm-up over six weeks with seed-list placement testing at each volume step, instead of resuming full volume immediately.
- 06
Reporting rebuilt on clicks and attributed revenue, since Apple Mail Privacy Protection had made the historic open-rate baseline meaningless.
The outcome
Seed testing moved Gmail inbox placement from 11% to 94% over the warm-up period, and complaint rate settled at 0.06% — comfortably inside the 0.3% rejection threshold and below Google’s 0.1% working target. Revenue per campaign rose despite sending to a list a third smaller, because the mail was arriving.
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