Part 2
Lever 8 — Email Marketing
Module 6
Module at a Glance
Reading Time
15–20 minutes
What You’ll Walk Away With
A complete understanding of what determines email deliverability, the specific technical and behavioral practices that keep your emails landing in the Primary inbox, and a monthly deliverability health check routine that catches problems before they damage your sender reputation.
L8M6.1
Why Deliverability Is the Foundation of Everything
Every strategy in this lever assumes one thing: that your emails actually arrive in your subscribers’ inboxes.
That assumption is not guaranteed. Email deliverability — the percentage of your sent emails that successfully land in the recipient’s inbox — is actively determined by your technical setup, your sending behavior, and your subscribers’ engagement patterns. Get these wrong and your emails end up in Promotions, Spam, or simply never delivered.
Deliverability problems are common and develop silently — your emails keep “sending” but fewer and fewer are actually reaching inboxes. Revenue declines. Open rates drop. You assume your content has become less interesting when the real problem is infrastructure.
Excellent sequences, compelling subject lines, and valuable content produce nothing if they never arrive. Deliverability is the foundation that every other email strategy sits on.
L8M6.2
How Email Deliverability Works
Email filtering operates on two levels. To protect your deliverability, you need to understand both.
Level 1
Technical Authentication
Before any content evaluation happens, email servers check whether your email is legitimately from who it claims to be from. Three technical DNS records verify your identity.
SPF — Sender Policy Framework
A DNS record that specifies which servers are authorized to send email from your domain. Without it, receiving servers have no way to verify you are who you claim to be.
DKIM — DomainKeys Identified Mail
A digital signature attached to every email you send, verifiable against a public key stored in your domain’s DNS. Proves the email was not tampered with in transit.
DMARC — Domain-based Message Authentication
A policy record that tells receiving servers what to do with emails that fail SPF or DKIM verification — and sends you reports on authentication failures.
All three records are set up in your domain’s DNS settings. Your email platform (MailerLite, ConvertKit) provides the exact records to add. Setup takes 20–30 minutes and significantly improves your baseline deliverability.
Level 2
Reputation and Engagement
Beyond authentication, email providers (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo) actively evaluate your sender reputation — a score based on your historical sending behavior and how subscribers interact with your emails.
Helps your reputation
- High open rates
- High click rates
- Low spam complaint rates
- Low unsubscribe rates
- Few bounces (valid addresses)
- Reply rates — the strongest positive signal
Hurts your reputation
- Spam complaints (above 0.1% triggers warnings)
- High unsubscribe rates
- Low engagement (emails consistently ignored)
- Sending to invalid addresses (bounces)
- Spam trigger words in subject or body
L8M6.3
The Technical Deliverability Checklist
Complete every item on this checklist before sending significant email volume.
Domain Authentication
- SPF record added to your domain’s DNS (provided by your email platform — typically a TXT record)
- DKIM record added to your domain’s DNS (typically a CNAME or TXT record)
- DMARC record added:
v=DMARC1; p=none; rua=mailto:you@yourdomain.com
- Authentication verified in your email platform’s domain settings (MailerLite shows a green checkmark when all records pass)
Sending Domain
- Sending from a domain email address (yourname@yourdomain.com), not Gmail or Yahoo
- Domain email set up through your hosting provider (typically included in your hosting plan)
- “From” name is recognizable — your personal name or brand name, not a generic label
List Hygiene
- Single opt-in or double opt-in configured (double opt-in provides a cleaner list)
- New subscribers verified — no imported lists of unknown origin
- Unsubscribe link visible in every email (legally required; automatic in MailerLite)
- Physical mailing address in email footer (required by CAN-SPAM law)
Warming a New Sending Domain
If you are sending from a new domain, email providers are suspicious of high volumes from unknown senders. Start low and ramp gradually.
- Begin with 50–100 emails per day
- Increase volume by 50% every few days
- Continue until you reach your target volume
L8M6.4
The Behavioral Practices That Protect Deliverability
Technical setup creates the foundation. Your ongoing sending behavior determines whether that foundation holds.
Practice 1
Maintain a Clean List
Remove unengaged subscribers every 90 days. Sending to people who never open your emails signals to providers that your content is irrelevant — damaging your reputation with every send.
- In MailerLite, create a segment of subscribers who have not opened any of your last 15 emails
- Run them through your re-engagement sequence (Module 4)
- Remove anyone who doesn’t re-engage
A smaller, more engaged list consistently outperforms a larger, inactive one — in deliverability, in revenue, and in sender reputation health.
Practice 2
Warm Up New Subscribers
Your welcome sequence does double deliverability duty — it delivers value and it warms up new subscribers. Every reply you receive from Email 1’s reply-ask tells Gmail that your subscribers want your emails.
Actively encourage replies in your first email — as a genuine invitation, not a gimmick. The replies provide valuable audience research and improve your deliverability simultaneously.
Practice 3
Avoid Spam Trigger Patterns
Certain patterns consistently trigger spam filters. Most are obvious — but some are less intuitive.
Subject lines to avoid
- ALL CAPS anywhere in the subject line
- More than one exclamation mark
- Words: “free,” “guaranteed,” “make money,” “earn $$$,” “act now,” “click here”
- More than 65 characters
Body content to avoid
- Images with no text (text-to-image ratio matters)
- Multiple large images with minimal text
- Excessive links (more than 3–4 in a short email)
- Invisible text (white on white — filters look for this)
- Attachments — always link to hosted files instead
Practice 4
Send Consistently
Sending frequency affects your reputation in two ways:
Too infrequent
Once per month or less — subscriber relationships go cold. Cold subscribers are more likely to mark you as spam.
Too frequent
More than daily for a content newsletter — fatigues subscribers and increases unsubscribes.
Recommended frequency: 1–2 emails per week for your main newsletter. Automated sequences can run more frequently because subscribers are in an active onboarding period where they expect more communication.
Practice 5
Monitor Your Spam Complaint Rate
Gmail’s Postmaster Tools (free at postmaster.google.com) shows your spam complaint rate for emails delivered to Gmail addresses.
Above 0.1%
Warning sign — investigate
Above 0.3%
Triggers automatic spam filtering — all emails affected
Check Postmaster Tools monthly. If elevated, immediately audit your list for subscribers who may not have genuinely opted in and review recent content for anything perceived as unsolicited.
L8M6.5
The Gmail Promotions Tab Problem
Even when your emails successfully reach subscribers’ inboxes, Gmail may route them to the Promotions tab rather than the Primary tab. Promotions emails get significantly fewer opens — subscribers check Primary first and Promotions only occasionally.
What causes Promotions routing
- Heavy use of images and HTML formatting
- Multiple links in a single email
- Promotional language (“offer,” “sale,” “limited time”)
- Sending from a business email with high volume
- Low reply rate to your emails
How to move to Primary
- Ask subscribers to drag your email to Primary and confirm (script below)
- Write plain-text emails with conversational language
- Encourage replies — every reply signals your email belongs in Primary
Word-for-word script — include in Email 1
“One quick thing — if my emails land in your Promotions tab, drag this email to your Primary tab and click ‘Yes’ when Gmail asks if you’d like to do this for future emails. Takes 5 seconds and means you’ll actually see what I send.”
💡
This one instruction, followed by even 10–15% of your subscribers, can significantly shift your placement toward Primary. Your most important emails — welcome sequence and high-value content — should be written as plain conversational text, not designed newsletters.
L8M6.6
Monthly Deliverability Health Check
Set a recurring monthly calendar reminder to run this 20-minute health check.
6 Checks · ~20 minutes
1
Platform Deliverability Score
MailerLite → Reports → Campaign overview. Check average open rate for the past 30 days. Below 20% suggests a deliverability or engagement problem worth investigating.
2
Bounce Rate
Check your hard bounce rate (invalid email addresses). Above 2% is a warning sign. Verify hard-bounced addresses are being removed automatically by your platform.
3
Unsubscribe Rate
Check unsubscribe rate per campaign. Above 0.5% per email is high and suggests either irrelevant content or excessive sending frequency.
4
Spam Complaint Rate
Check Gmail Postmaster Tools for your spam complaint rate. Above 0.1% requires immediate attention.
5
Inactive Segment Review
Run a segment query: subscribers who have not opened any email in the past 60 days. Note the size. If it’s growing rapidly, your re-engagement sequence needs to run more frequently.
6
Authentication Records Verification
Verify your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records are still active and passing. DNS records can occasionally be disrupted by hosting changes or domain renewals. Use MXToolbox.com (free) to verify records are configured correctly.
📊
Log these six numbers monthly in your Growth System Dashboard (from Lever 4, Module 6). Trends over 3–6 months reveal patterns that individual snapshots miss.
Module Summary
Here’s What We Covered
- Why deliverability is the foundation everything else sits on — emails that don’t arrive earn nothing, and problems develop silently
- How deliverability works: technical authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) at Level 1, sender reputation and engagement signals at Level 2
- The complete technical deliverability checklist: domain authentication, sending domain setup, list hygiene, and domain warming for new senders
- Five behavioral practices: clean list maintenance, subscriber warming through replies, avoiding spam trigger patterns, consistent sending frequency, and monitoring spam complaint rates
- The Gmail Promotions tab problem: causes, and how to move to Primary through direct subscriber instruction, plain-text formatting, and reply encouragement
- The monthly deliverability health check: six metrics, where to find them, and what thresholds indicate a problem
Next up Lever 8, Module 7: Growing and Scaling Your Email List Over Time