Build email on a foundation of deliverability, not design

Build email on a foundation of deliverability, not design

Teams obsess over how an email looks and ignore whether it lands, which is backwards. A gorgeous email in the spam folder converts nobody. Before you design a single template, configure the boring infrastructure that decides whether your messages reach the inbox at all, because that is the foundation everything else sits on.

Authenticate your sending domain properly: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC set up and verified. This is non-negotiable now that the major inbox providers actively reject or junk unauthenticated bulk mail. It is a one-time configuration that protects every send you will ever make, and skipping it means your carefully built nurture sequence quietly dies in spam folders while your dashboard cheerfully reports it as "sent".

Decide your subscription and consent model deliberately, especially if you touch European contacts. Configure the subscription types so a contact can opt into your newsletter without being opted into your sales sequence, keep a clean record of consent, and make unsubscribe genuinely one click. This is partly law and partly deliverability: a list that only contains people who want to hear from you is a list that lands in the inbox, because engagement is what the inbox providers reward.

Protect your sender reputation like the asset it is. Suppress hard bounces automatically, set a re-engagement or sunset rule for contacts who have ignored you for months, and never blast your whole database because a number looked low. Reputation is earned slowly and lost in one bad send to a stale list, and once it drops, even your good emails struggle to land.

Only after that foundation is solid does the design work matter, and then it is mostly discipline: a recognisable from-name, a subject line that earns the open, one clear action per email, and a plain-text version that renders when images are blocked. Configure templates your team can reuse so brand and structure stay consistent without rebuilding from scratch each time.

INTERVIEW EWOUD: What is the deliverability mistake you most often inherit when you take over a client's marketing hub, and what is your fix-it sequence?