Email Deliverability & Reputation Management

You certainly can, but it is important to understand the difference between buying a tool and hiring an expert.

The industry data shows that 85% of businesses who try to do this themselves never actually finish the job – they get stuck in ‘monitoring mode’ forever because they are afraid of breaking something. We don’t sell you a tool that watches you fail; we are the 15% that gets it done.

Services like dmarcian or Valimail are excellent at gathering data – they act like an X-ray machine. They show you exactly what is happening inside your domain, but they don’t perform the surgery to fix it. You still need to interpret the data and know exactly which buttons to push.

Here is why that matters: We recently met a business owner who tried to do this themselves. They signed up for a reporting tool and immediately applied the “recommended” security fixes. While the settings were technically secure, they hadn’t been tuned for their specific tools.

The result? The new security rules immediately blocked their Stripe invoices from being delivered. The emails didn’t even go to the spam folder – they were rejected outright and simply vanished. This cut off their ability to bill clients and halted their cash flow until it was resolved.

We don’t just provide the report; we analyze it. We verify every service you use – from your invoicing software to your marketing platform – before we “lock the doors,” ensuring you don’t accidentally lock yourself out of your own business.

Deliverability is a moving target, not a “set and forget” task. Spammers change tactics constantly, so providers like Google and Yahoo frequently update their rules. Once we have all of the technicals correct, and your domain is correctly identifying all of the services that you use to send emails, we provide ongoing management to monitor your reputation, adjust to new compliance laws (like the recent changes for bulk senders), and ensure you don’t accidentally slide back into the spam folder.

This is known as “spoofing,” and it happens when your domain lacks the security protocols that verify your identity. Think of it like a physical letter: anyone can write your return address on the back of an envelope and drop it in a mailbox. Without the right digital “postmarks” (authentication), email providers don’t know the message is a fake.

When we manage your domain, we implement strict policies (like DMARC) that tell email providers to reject any message using your name that didn’t originate from your authorised systems. This stops bad actors from impersonating you, protecting both your reputation and your clients from fraud.

We can maximize your chances of hitting the Primary inbox by ensuring your technical reputation is flawless. However, Gmail’s algorithms also look at user engagement and content. Once we secure your technical foundation, we can advise on best practices for your content to help you stay out of the Promotions tab.

If your domain has been blacklisted, it means you have been flagged as a known source of spam or malware. We perform a deep investigation to find out why – whether it was a hacked account, a compromised website, or bad sending practices. We then clean up the issue and petition the blacklist operators to remove your domain, restoring your ability to communicate. In the worst cases, we will also reach out to the providers of the email service where you are having issues and work with their IT departments to help get you released from these blacklists. 

Yes. Marketing tools rely on your primary domain’s reputation. If your main business domain has a poor reputation, your marketing emails (from tools like MailChimp or HubSpot) will suffer, and vice versa. We ensure your infrastructure supports your marketing efforts, so your campaigns actually reach the audience you are paying to target.

We can fix the technical configurations (the “plumbing”) immediately. However, rebuilding a damaged reputation with email providers takes a little time – similar to improving a credit score. We typically see improvements quickly, but if you have been blacklisted or have a low sender score, we manage the reputation process to gradually restore trust with the inbox providers.

Note that to fix a poor reputation, or a block with a specific recipient where you are haing issues we will also need to reach out to technical partners who run your recipient’s email infrastructure. This very often relies on a lot of legwork and finding a friendly contact at your recipient who can escalate it to their IT department.

No. We work with your existing setup to repair your reputation. We optimise the engine you already have rather than forcing you to buy a new car. However, if you are using a free domain (like @gmail.com) for your business, we will help you migrate to a professional domain and email service such as Google Workspace for Business, as free addresses are a major trigger for spam filters and there is very little you can do to affect the email delivery reputation when you do not control the domain you are sending from.

No. That is exactly what we handle for you.

These are the technical protocols that verify your identity and prevent spammers from impersonating your business. You don’t have the time to become an IT expert. We configure these settings perfectly in the background so you can focus on running your business, not troubleshooting DNS records, or reading confusing email deliverability reports. 

We do the heavy lifting, but we need you to unlock the doors so we can get to work. To secure your domain and stop your emails from going to spam, we need four things from you:

1. Access to your DNS (Domain Name System) This is the control panel for your domain. We need access here to publish the digital “passports” (SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records) that tell the world which emails are actually from you.

   • Note: If you are using Cloudflare, that is ideal – it is the fastest and most secure way to manage these changes.

2. A list of your email tools We need to know every piece of software that sends email on your behalf. This includes your everyday email (Google Workspace/Office 365), but also your marketing tools (Mailchimp, HubSpot), invoicing software (Xero, Stripe), or CRM (Salesforce). If we don’t know about a tool, we can’t authorize it, and it might get blocked.

3. Temporary access to specific platforms To connect the “pipes” correctly, we may need you to log in to some of these tools (like your newsletter platform) to copy specific security settings or API keys. We will guide you through exactly where to look.

4. A little of your time for “Sanity Checks” We will schedule a couple of brief check-ins. Since we are working with your live business communications, we need to verify that everything we find matches your real-world operations. We also need you to report back if you see or hear anything unusual—like a client mentioning a bounced email—so we can fine-tune the settings immediately.

Yes we will review your email marketing tool as well when reviewing email security. When dealing with email deliverability we will assess based on your domain name, not just a single tool. This may include a CRM, an email marketing system, billing systems and of course your daily email such as Outlook or Gmail.

This is the technical part of email deliverability, and it will help your domain build a more reliable, secure reputation as an email sender that leads to a higher chance of your email landing in the inbox. Remeber that there are other factors that can cause email deliverability issues such as the quality of your website, the number of links in your email, the way the email is written and the subject line.

Correct implementation of the SPF, DKIM and DMARC protocols will help your emails make it to the inbox. To stop emails going to spam you also have to assess the quality of your list, the email subject and content plus your previous sending history.