Sender Reputation Guardrails (Delivery)
A checklist with 7 steps: Provision a dedicated sending domain per client before the first sequence goes live.
By InnovaAI ResearchPublished
What are the steps?
Sender Reputation Guardrails (Delivery)
- 01
Provision a dedicated sending domain per client before the first sequence goes live
Use a subdomain separate from the client's primary domain so a reputation hit on outbound cannot contaminate transactional or brand email. Warm it for 2 to 3 weeks at 20 to 50 sends per day before scaling.
- 02
Verify SPF, DKIM, and DMARC alignment on every sending identity
Check each mailbox and domain pair, not just the root domain. Misaligned authentication is the most common cause of bulk folder placement on the first send.
- 03
Cap daily volume per mailbox and per domain at a level the domain history can support
New domains stay under 50 per day; aged domains can move toward 150 to 200. Tools like Amplemarket and Klenty expose these caps directly, but the number should come from your own warmup log, not the vendor default.
- 04
Run a seed-list inbox placement test before each new campaign template ships
Send to a panel spanning Gmail, Outlook, and one enterprise filter. Pause the campaign if placement falls below 80 percent in the primary tab.
- 05
Instrument bounce and complaint thresholds with an automatic pause
Set hard stops at 3 percent hard bounce and 0.1 percent spam complaint. A sequence that trips either threshold gets reviewed by a human before it resumes, not auto-restarted.
- 06
Schedule a monthly reputation review across all client sending domains
Pull Google Postmaster Tools and Microsoft SNDS data, compare against the prior month, and log any domain trending toward a blocklist. Surface the trend to the client in the retainer report before it becomes an outage.
- 07
Rotate and retire underperforming copy before volume increases
If reply rate drops more than 30 percent week over week, cut volume and rewrite rather than pushing more sends through a fatigued list. Platforms such as Salesloft and Outplay make variant-level reporting easy enough to catch this inside a week.