Cold Email Deliverability Guide
Everything that decides whether your email lands in the inbox, in order of impact.
Authentication comes first
Publish SPF, DKIM and DMARC on the sending domain and verify alignment before a single campaign goes out. Without these, everything else is noise.
Use a separate sending domain
Keep cold outreach off the domain that carries invoices, password resets and customer conversations. A lookalike domain isolates reputation risk.
Volume ramps, it does not launch
New mailboxes start at a handful of sends a day and grow gradually. Sudden volume from a cold identity is the single clearest spam signal.
List quality is a deliverability setting
Bounces above roughly two percent damage reputation quickly. Verify addresses, suppress role accounts, and remove anything you cannot confirm.
Content still matters
Link count, image-only bodies, tracking domains that nobody recognises and spam-trigger phrasing all drag placement down. Plain text with one link is the safe default.
Measure placement, not opens
Seed tests and reply rate tell you where mail lands. Open rate is inflated by privacy proxies and should never be the deliverability metric.
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