Domain-level analytics for email strategy

I thought great copy was the secret to cold email. Then I realized 80% of my emails were landing in spam. Here’s what we found: 1️⃣ Domain protection is the #1 lever for deliverability → Most teams burn their main domain without realising it. Once a domain is flagged, everything gets filtered (even normal emails). We run 100+ secondary domains to protect our brand and reduce risk. Tool stack: Google Workspace, Namecheap, Warmup tools Next step: Move every outbound sequence off your primary domain. 2️⃣ Safe volume beats high volume → Sending 500 emails/day from one domain is the fastest path to spam. Deliverability collapses instantly. We spread volume across hundreds of mailboxes and stay under 40/day for each. Impact: Fewer red flags, higher trust, better inbox placement. Next step: Audit how many sends each domain is doing right now. 3️⃣ Authentication is non-negotiable → SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are the foundation ESPs check before letting anything through. Without proper authentication, you look suspicious by default. Tools: dmarcian, Google Admin, Cloudflare Next step: Run a deliverability test and fix whatever shows up in red. 4️⃣ Warm-up → Most domains get burned because people start sending too early. ESPs need time to trust you. We warm each domain for two full weeks before sending anything. Why it works: Slow ramp-up = better deliverability. If you just bought a domain, don’t touch it for 14 days. 5️⃣ Natural variation reduces spam triggers → Sending the same message repeatedly creates patterns that ESPs flag. You need micro-variation to look human. We use subtle spintax + a few message versions per campaign. Tools: Instantly.ai, Smartlead Next step: Add small variations to your first lines and CTAs. 6️⃣ Clean tracking protects your domain reputation → Tracking links are an instant red flag. Most agencies don’t realize this. We use custom tracking domains or disable tracking entirely for key campaigns. Next step: Replace all generic tracking links. The results: → 500,000+ emails/month reaching real decision-makers → Higher inbox placement across every ESP → Predictable revenue for ColdIQ clients → Stable domain health across all mailboxes Deliverability isn’t the flashy part of outbound, but it’s the part everything else depends on. If you want our 7-day GTM deliverability setup (domains, warm-up, templates, monitoring tools)... drop me a message, happy to help.

I've said this before and I'll say it again — we've been struggling.. with cold email deliverability. Cold email infrastructure is frustrating - even when following best practices, deliverability remains inconsistent. I researched everything to solve this problem once & for all. Let me break down what actually works: 1) Infrastructure & Setup: -> Domains & inboxes - Never send cold from your primary domain - Use 3-5 sibling domains, 3-5 inboxes each - Keep branding believable; avoid spammy TLDs (.tk, .ml) - Set up Google Workspace or M365 for legitimacy -> Authentication - SPF covers every sender, DKIM at 2048-bit minimum - DMARC from p=none → quarantine once stable (never jump to reject) - Alignment across From/Return-Path is non-negotiable - Test with mail-tester.com weekly -> Compliance - Clear opt-out, real physical address, legitimate interest docs (EU) - Honor opt-outs within 24 hrs max 2) Sending Strategy: -> Warm-up - New domains need 8-12 weeks minimum - Simulate real engagement (opens/replies/forwards) - Use warmup tools like mailwarm, lemwarm or Instantly.ai -> Volume & Pacing - Start 10-20/day per inbox, add +20-50 weekly if metrics stay green - Randomize send windows; 60-120s gaps b/w sends - Respect recipient time zones (9am-5pm local) -> Timing - B2B sweet spots: Tue-Thu late morning & early afternoon - Avoid Mondays (inbox overload) & Fridays (weekend mode) 3) Content & Copy: -> Subject lines - 6-10 words, human and specific - Personalized context beats cleverness every time - Avoid fake urgency, ALL CAPS, excessive punctuation!!! - Test: "Quick question about [specific company pain point]" -> Body - Short, skimmable, 1 idea + 1 ask maximum - Personalize in layers: hyper-custom for top 10%, segment-level for rest - Use natural language, avoid marketing speak - Images and links kill deliverability - use sparingly -> CTA - Make next step tiny (15-min scan, 1-question reply, "worth a chat?") - Single CTA only - multiple options confuse and reduce response 4) List & Data: -> Sourcing - Prioritize intent and fit over volume always - Dedupe domains (max 1-2 people per company per campaign) - Use Apollo, ZoomInfo or Clay for verified contacts -> Hygiene - Verify syntax + domain + mailbox before sending - Remove hard bounces instantly (never retry) - Prune unengaged cohorts quarterly - Never recycle unsubscribed contacts -> Segmentation - Hot/Warm/Cold bands by recency + engagement - Throttle "Cold" segments heavily 5) Monitoring & KPIs: - Delivery rate ≥98%; investigate anything <95% - Bounce rate <2% (≤1% is excellent) - Spam complaints <0.1% absolute ceiling - Track domain/IP reputation, blacklist status weekly - Use seed accounts & inbox tests ps. Have a response/POA for objections like “not the right person” / “not decision maker” / “No longer at company” / “have in-house team already” / “please contact john from abc” You can also use Valley on LinkedIn - book 2 demos/week for every seat.

We analyzed 21,297 cold email replies across every major email provider. It resulted in surprising findings about Google vs. Outlook. How we ran the analysis: - Exported one week of replies from Airtable - Used Google's DNS endpoint in Clay to identify each recipient's email provider - Categorized replies as Interested, Not Interested, or Automated. Dataset breakdown: - 21,297 total replies analyzed - 4,086 real replies (Interested + Not Interested) - 16,433 automated replies (OOO/NOU) - Outlook share: 10.7% of all replies Finding 1: Outlook underperforms in volume but is not dead. It represented just 10.7% of all replies. It was much lower than Google and SMTP, but still resulted in thousands of conversations. Finding 2: 77% of all replies were automated. Most were OOO or "no longer at the company" responses. These inflate response rates without creating pipeline. If 15-20% are "no longer at company," you're hurting deliverability. To that point, we are also beginning to run employment checks on our lead lists to remove bad fit leads. We'd need to send less emails to get the same level of results, which would, of course, improve our deliverability. My two cents: 1. Prioritize Google first, then SMTP, then Outlook when sending. 2. Filter aggressively for NOU/OOO replies. 3. Test ultra-short copy for Outlook. 4. Preserve domain health by cutting noise and focusing on right providers. Let me know if more experiments and analyses like this are interesting to you, and I can certainly do more of them.

📧 Your email metrics might be lying to you. Ever celebrated those impressive open and click rates only to wonder why your campaigns aren't delivering the results you expected? I see this all the time. Marketers obsessing over surface-level metrics while completely missing what's actually happening behind the scenes. The real culprit? Email deliverability. But here's the thing: deliverability isn't just about whether your email was delivered. It's about WHERE it landed. Primary inbox? Promotions tab? Or worse... the spam folder? And guess what? You could have "healthy" open rates while a significant portion of your audience never sees your emails at all. The invisible problem is that most email programs suffer from deliverability issues they don't even know exist because they're looking at the wrong metrics. Why your current approach might be failing you: ✅ Domain level: Your emails might be reaching Gmail users but getting blocked by Outlook ✅ Feedback loop gaps: Without proper tools to monitor your sender reputation, you're flying blind ✅ Segmented performance: High engagement from one segment masks zero visibility with another So what should you ACTUALLY be measuring? → Inbox Placement Rate by Domain (not just overall delivery) → Open & Click Reach over time (not just per email) → Unsubscribe patterns and bounce rates → Engagement trends across your subscriber lifecycle The truth is uncomfortable but necessary: those impressive open & click rates you've been reporting? They're just the tip of the iceberg. They don't tell you if your emails are reaching everyone they should. They don't reveal if your sender reputation is tanking. And they certainly don't show you the revenue you're leaving on the table. Remember: What gets measured gets improved. But only if you're measuring what actually matters. Is it time to look beyond those vanity metrics and get serious about your email deliverability? Your revenue numbers will thank you.

No one talks about this. But it’s killing your revenue. You can spend $30k on beautiful design, clever copy, and strategic offers... But if your emails are going to spam? You're lighting money on fire. Bad deliverability is the most expensive silent killer in your email marketing. It’s the first thing we check in any audit—because everything else depends on it. Great email strategy sits on one thing ⤷ A clean, trusted domain with inbox placement dialed in. Here’s what we check in a deliverability audit: 1. Sending Infrastructure ⤷ DMARC, SPF, DKIM setup ⤷ Branded sending domain 2. List Health ⤷ % of unengaged contacts ⤷ List scrubbing cadence ⤷ Presence of bot/trap accounts ⤷ % of customers vs. prospects 3. Inbox Placement ⤷ Are you hitting Primary, Tabs, Spam… or just disappearing? ⤷ Which ISPs are flagging you? 4. Blacklist Checks ⤷ Using tools like GlockApps/MXToolbox/MultiRBL ⤷ Identifying domain/IP reputation issues 5. Segmentation Strategy ⤷ Are you using the correct segmentation filters? ⤷ Are you excluding the right contacts from your sends? ⤷ Are you over or under-segmenting your list? Until these boxes are checked, nothing else matters. Because visibility drives conversions. More emails in inboxes → More eyes on content → More sales. Stop searching for silver bullets. Fix your foundations first.

3 things we have changed in our Email Deliverability workflow at Growth Engine X and 2 things we are keeping the same that I think everyone should think about doing. 1) Cleaning up bad domains with Smartlead API and reordering on Hypertide.io Smartlead upgraded their API. Now we can get the exact reply rate statistics on a domain level for any time period that we want. We're sending this data to Supabase and then writing SQL queries to figure out which domains we should be canceling and which domains we should be keeping. 2) Sending to Google first and then harder to reach inboxes when campaigns are falling flat. Leadmagic just made a tool called inboxriskscore(.)com you can use to identify easy vs. hard domains to send emails to. We've also been seeing that Outlook/Proof Point is harder to break into. Nick Abraham released a report that 10% of his replies at his agency are coming from Outlook. The only thing that we've seen consistently combat these low inbox placements on these harder-to-reach inboxes is letting the domains age for a longer time. But customers can't usually wait for 4-8 weeks to start an email campaign. Start with a regular 2-week warmup, sending to Google inboxes, and then start bringing in the Outlook proof point inboxes if necessary. 3) Auto batching inboxes into campaigns to keep within domain rate limit threshold. Smartlead implemented a domain rate limit threshold to protect Azure sending accounts but it messed up our sending volume. We easily use Cursor now to plug into our Supabase to find relevant accounts and divide them appropriately across campaigns so that ever hypertide domain is dedicated to one campaign and one campaign only. Things that are staying the same. 1) Continue to keep open tracking off. Cancelling open tracking test and moving to just reply tracking. I'm still not completely against open tracking, but for the past four to six weeks that we've been trying the experiment, we saw positive responses go down on the days that we were tracking opens, and reply rate was just as good of a metric to be watching. So we'll cancel using this test as a systemic thing that we automatically do every week and only turn it on as needed. 2) Buying capacity with Hypertide to send 5,000 emails per day even if a client needs 1,000 per day just to make sure we always have reserve and they age much longer. Still keeping 50% of sending capacity in warming reserve at full volume. Always keep more than you need in reserve so you can try as best as possible to not get caught with no warmed up healthy inboxes. Anything you're trying lately that you would add?

The biggest myth in cold email today? That high volume = high results. After a dense (and brutally honest) webinar with some of the best minds in deliverability, one message stood out clearly: Your sending domain is your most valuable asset. And most people are burning it to the ground without even realising. The new rule of cold email success in 2025 isn't about tools or copy. It's about long-term infrastructure thinking, the stuff that doesn't show up in your outreach dashboard but determines whether you inbox or land in spam. Here are 4 big shifts you should make if you care about results that last: 1. Diversify Everything Use multiple domain registrars, email providers (Google, Outlook, SMTP), sequencers, and even IP geos. Don’t let your whole system rely on one platform. 2. Send Less Per Domain Volume is the #1 reason domains get burned. Instead of pushing 150 emails from one domain, spread 50 emails each across three. Smaller volume = longer domain lifespan. 3. Aged Domains Are a Cheat Code Especially for Outlook deliverability. Domains that are a few years old inbox far better than fresh ones. Yes, they cost more. But they save a lot more. 4. Measure at the Domain Level Your bounce and reply rates should be monitored domain by domain. Every month, cut the worst 20% (by reply rate) and replace them. This keeps your entire ecosystem healthy. Bonus: Subdomains, geo-TLDs, warmup strategy changes - there’s a lot more happening under the surface. But if you just internalise these 4, you’ll be ahead of 90% of senders. Big thanks to the panel for sharing real insights, not just theory: Christian Oland (RevGen Labs & RevReply) 🚀 Benjamin Reed ( RevyOps) Kidous Mahteme (Inframail) Dean Fiacco (ScaledMail) V. Frank Sondors 🥓 (Salesforge 🔥) ⚡Felipe Aranguiz (Instantly.ai) Ken Volk (Mailrun) Namit Jindal (Aerosend) Piotr Mikrut (Experiment5m) If you're building or scaling outbound in 2025, watch this space. The playbook is being rewritten.

Email success used to depend on creative brilliance. Now it depends on engineering discipline and domain health. Most marketers still think deliverability is a creative problem. Send better subject lines. Reduce frequency. Write more engaging copy. But recent Oracle research shows this thinking is outdated. Domain reputation now carries twice as much weight as your sending IP. Infrastructure matters more than content and volume combined. The mailbox providers have raised the bar. Deliverability in 2025 isn't about what you send. It's about the foundation you send from. Here's how the priorities have shifted: 👉 Domain reputation is now the strongest signal - harder to fix than IP issues, it's a long game 👉Infrastructure quality makes or breaks everything else 👉Spam complaints get instant enforcement from major providers 👉Content and volume still matter, but much less than before 👉Engagement matters less thanks to Apple's privacy changes Most retention teams are still optimising the wrong things. They're tweaking subject lines when they should be auditing their technical setup. They're A/B testing send times when they should be monitoring domain health. If your deliverability strategy revolves around content and frequency, you're missing the bigger picture. Treat your domain reputation like a core business asset. Monitor complaints religiously. Make sure your infrastructure can actually support your ambitions. In 2025, inbox placement is about trust and engineering discipline. Not just creative brilliance. #emailmarketing #deliverability #customerretention #dtcmarketing #emailstrategy

"Our open & click rates are way down... how do I figure out what is happening?" I used to get this message a couple times a month.  Post gmail and yahoo deliverability updates I get it about once a week. To get the right answers, you need to ask the right questions. So I put together this checklist to help you take back control of your program. 1. Is the issue universal or specific to a domain?  Break down your open and clicks report by domain. Often you'll find that a set of domains have lower engagement metrics than the others... maybe you'll find that those engagement metrics went off a cliff recently. 2. What are your spam complaint rates in google postmaster tools?  Yes, check your spam rates in Klaviyo… but the only source of truth for gmail is google postmaster tools. You’d be surprised by how often the two metrics don’t line up. If you’ve spiked above .3% spam complaint rates or you’re consistently above .1%, check your engagement metrics for gmail. There’s a chance a sizable percentage of your sends are landing in spam. 3. Is it a reputation issue or a content issue? Content is the other side of the deliverability coin. When you use inbox placement tools you can test whether the template and modules your sending are getting flagged as spam or busting their way through to the primary box. Engagement rates can dip because of a subtle change you made… or a subtle change to the inbox placement algorithms. The only way to know is to test. Bonus: Are you using retention.com or emailing users who are not opted in? There is a different level of deliverability risk in sourcing emails through third parties and sending to users who did not provide expressed consent. Know the risk you’re taking, and if you’re going to take it, do it intelligently by regularly cleaning your list. This audience can grow to be a large percentage of your targeting. Over time they will often engage at a lower rate than subscribers with expressed consent. Jimmy Kim recently coined 2024 as the year of email deliverability and he's right. Deliverability is not a box to check it is a series of metrics to monitor and optimize. If you're sending emails that don't land and you're seeing your engagement slip, all you're doing is losing ground on speeding treadmill. Put your detective hat on and follow these steps to get those numbers back in shape.