Outbound reply rates don’t always fall because the messaging is wrong. Often the emails are going to spam before anyone reads them — the result of DNS misconfiguration, sending patterns that trip filters, or volume ramp-ups that weren’t planned. Domain reputation damage is slow to accumulate and fast to feel: one bad month of sending can take six months to recover, and the problem is largely invisible until the pipeline numbers stop making sense.
We audit the full technical layer: SPF, DKIM, DMARC, sending infrastructure, warm-up patterns, and compliance posture across jurisdictions where you’re sending. We review actual sending behavior, not just configuration. The deliverable is a reputation report, a prioritized fix list, and a warm-up plan calibrated to your volume. We come from high-volume outbound operations, not email marketing theory — the guardrails we recommend are practical ones that teams can actually enforce.
What the audit regularly surfaces that teams miss on their own: shared IP pools where one bad sender in the pool is dragging down placement for everyone on it; MX and SPF records that were set correctly when the domain was provisioned but have since been partially overwritten by a new tool’s onboarding instructions; and sending patterns that look reasonable in aggregate but have burst windows that spam filters flag. The compliance picture is increasingly consequential too — CAN-SPAM, CASL, and GDPR opt-out handling is often inconsistent across the sequences in use, which creates risk exposure that isn’t visible until a complaint lands.
To run the audit, we need DNS access or records from whoever manages the domain, access to the sending platform (typically a sequence tool or ESP), and sending logs for the past 60–90 days. We also need a session with whoever manages the outbound operation day to day — the person who knows which domains and inboxes are in active use, how warm-up was handled when new domains were added, and what the current sending volumes look like per sender. For teams running multiple domains or multiple senders, that inventory conversation is where the audit starts.
Sometimes the audit reveals that the deliverability problem is recoverable but not quickly. When a domain has been burned — blacklisted or with a reputation score too low to rehabilitate — the honest answer is that the fix involves new infrastructure, not just configuration changes. We say that directly and include a migration path in the deliverable. The warm-up plan in the output is specific to your volume, not a generic 30-day template: ramp schedule, per-inbox daily caps, and the metrics to watch at each stage. Teams that follow the plan and enforce the outbound rules checklist typically see measurable inbox placement improvement within 3–4 weeks. The most natural next step from here is building the full outbound engine on the clean infrastructure — sequences, personalization, reply routing — once the foundation is stable.