Deliverability Gate Before First Send (Onboarding)

Deliverability Gate Before First Send (Onboarding)

1. 01

   Inventory every sending domain and mailbox the client will use, including any inherited from a prior vendor

   List domains, subdomains, and individual mailboxes with their age, current daily volume, and whether SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records are published and aligned.

2. 02

   Warm each new domain for 21 to 28 days before it carries live campaign volume

   Start at 20 to 50 sends per mailbox per day and step up roughly 20 percent weekly; a domain that jumps from zero to 500 sends in a week is the single most common cause of a blocklist event.

3. 03

   Cap per-mailbox daily volume at 30 to 50 for cold outreach and keep total domain volume under the threshold the client's ESP tier supports

   Platforms such as Amplemarket and Klenty expose per-mailbox throttles; set them explicitly rather than trusting defaults, because defaults are tuned for single-tenant senders, not agency-managed domains.

4. 04

   Run a seed-list test across Gmail, Outlook, and one corporate filter before the first client campaign goes live

   Send to a monitored seed inbox on each provider and confirm inbox placement, link rendering, and image loading; document the result in the client file so a later deliverability dispute has a baseline.

5. 05

   Verify the suppression list is loaded and deduplicated against the client's existing customers and open opportunities

   Importing a purchased list that overlaps the client's own book is a fast route to spam complaints from people who already know the brand.

6. 06

   Confirm consent basis and regional rules for every list segment, with opt-out language present in the first message

   GDPR, CASL, and CAN-SPAM carry different consent standards; note the basis per segment so a compliance question from the client has a written answer.

7. 07

   Set bounce and complaint thresholds that pause the sequence automatically

   A common gate is 2 percent bounce and 0.1 percent complaint; when either trips, the sequence halts and a human reviews the list before resuming.