Email Marketing & Deliverability
Reaching the inbox is the whole job.
Since Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Apple tightened their bulk-sender rules, unauthenticated mail is no longer quietly filtered to spam — it is rejected outright at the gateway. We build the sending infrastructure and the authentication first, then the campaigns on top of it.
What you end up with
- SPF, DKIM and DMARC in place, with DMARC moved to enforcement
- Marketing, transactional and outbound isolated on separate subdomains
- Complaint rate held near 0.1% — well inside the 0.3% rejection threshold
- Reporting on clicks and revenue, not proxy-inflated open rates
Scope
What the engagement covers.
Platforms & tooling
- Brevo
- Klaviyo
- Customer.io
- OpenEMM
- Mautic
- listmonk
- Smartlead
- Instantly
- Amazon SES
- Postmark
- DMARC
- 01
Platform selection and setup
Hosted where it makes sense — Brevo, Klaviyo, Customer.io, Mailchimp — or self-hosted on OpenEMM, Mautic, listmonk or Keila where data residency, list size or per-contact pricing makes owning the stack the better economics.
- 02
Sending infrastructure
Amazon SES, Postmark, SendGrid, Mailgun or Resend, with marketing, transactional and outbound split across separate subdomains so a bad campaign can never take your invoices down with it.
- 03
Authentication and compliance
SPF, DKIM and DMARC taken all the way to enforcement rather than left at p=none, plus PTR records, TLS, and the one-click List-Unsubscribe header that marketing mail now requires.
- 04
Deliverability recovery
For domains already burned: reputation diagnosis, seed-list placement testing, IP and domain warm-up, list hygiene, and a re-permission campaign to bring the complaint rate back down.
- 05
Cold outreach infrastructure
Smartlead or Instantly on dedicated sending domains with per-mailbox volume caps and automated warm-up, deliberately isolated from your primary domain so prospecting never risks its reputation.
- 06
Campaign operations
Segmentation, lifecycle automation, templates tested against Outlook’s rendering engine, and reporting measured on clicks and revenue rather than open rates, which Apple’s privacy proxy made unreliable.
How it runs
Four phases, agreed before we start.
- 01
Assess
Output: environment map, risk list, fixed-price proposal.
- 02
Plan
Output: runbook, comms templates, rollback criteria.
- 03
Execute
Output: live status channel, step-by-step verification log.
- 04
Support
Output: reconciliation report, documentation, handover session.
Questions
About email marketing & deliverability.
Our campaigns are going to spam. Is that recoverable?
Almost always, but not instantly. We diagnose whether the cause is authentication, reputation, list quality or content, fix it, then warm the domain back up over several weeks. Anyone promising a same-week fix is guessing.
Should we self-host or use a hosted platform?
Hosted suits most teams — it is cheaper until list size makes per-contact pricing bite. Self-hosting on OpenEMM, Mautic or listmonk earns its keep when you have data-residency obligations, a very large list, or you need the sending logic under your own control. We run the numbers rather than assume.
Will cold outreach damage our main domain?
It will if you send it from your main domain, which is why we never do. Outbound runs on separate sending domains with their own warm-up and volume caps, so a bad prospecting list cannot affect the mail your customers rely on.
Why did our open rates stop making sense?
Apple Mail Privacy Protection pre-fetches tracking pixels, so a large share of recorded opens never involved a person. We report on clicks, replies and attributed revenue instead, and reset the baseline accordingly.
Also from Queue Bytes
Other things we do.
Email Migration
Move mail, calendars and contacts without losing a message.
ExploreManaged IT Support
A help desk that answers, plus the maintenance behind it.
ExploreMicrosoft 365 Deployment & Audits
Deploy it properly, then prove the tenant is actually secure.
ExploreGoogle Workspace
Deployment, hardening, and moves in either direction.
ExploreTalk to someone who has done email marketing & deliverability before.
A short call to understand the environment, then discovery if it looks like a fit. You will get a written proposal either way.