Debunking: Email Deliverability is not Set and Forget

Your Email Deliverability is constantly changing. Here’s why:

• Compliance is changing (have you had the Google/Yahoo update scares?)
• Best practices are constantly changing (Remember the good old days in 2021 of mass emailing cold leads and getting 50% open rates?)
• Protocols are changing (Care to follow SPF, DKIM, DMARC, BIMI constant updates?)
• Your senders reputation changes (You like to check IP rep, Domain Rep, ESP rep, spam traps, spam lists, placement tests every day?)
• Security and Deliverability now go together: have you secured your emails?
• And many more in-depth details are provided below ??

Pillars of deliverability and why it’s not set and forget:

DNS compliance changes:

• As email scams such as phishing become increasingly common, compliance is becoming stricter. The more secure your emails are, the higher the chances of them landing in the inbox.
• New protocols get added. BIMI was just adopted last year. Do you want to leverage a logo and a verified checkmark in the inbox?
• Did you start using a new emailing app recently and you need to update your configuration? Beehiiv? Apollo? Hubspot? Substack? → Need to update your DNS!
• DMARC needs monitoring: receiving those unreadable XMLs report in your inbox?
• DMARC is tricky to secure: are you 100% sure your SPF/DKIM alignment is correct?
• Switching DMARC to p=quarantine or p=reject? Careful, you could be sending your emails to SPAM.
• Protocol changes: There have been 26 changes to the SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and BIMI protocols in the last 2 years. It's pretty hard to stay on top of that considering everything else going on.
• IP ranges can change. Did the provider update your IP address and it's now not aligned properly in your records?
• Are you using the right fail methods: ever heard of squiggly ~all? Straight line -all?
• Did one of your authenticated apps add new IPs to their IP redirects and you are now over the allowed number of redirections in your SPF? Or even worse, have you added static IP addresses that your tools changed on you?
• The apps you are using are changing their authentication protocols, did you update your records to reflect that?

Your email senders reputation changes:

• IP address reputation can change. How do you ensure that the other third parties you're sharing an IP with are not degrading the IP address reputation and your emails are suffering from it?
• Perhaps your BD team is hitting a list that is hurting your reputation?
• Maybe someone is spoofing your domain and damaging your reputation?
• Domain reputation can decline quickly and takes a long time to fix: how will you know before it’s too late?
• Perhaps Microsoft Outlook started blocking one of your IPs for an obscure reason (ever heard of MTS-STS?). How will you know?
• Maybe your authentication mechanisms started failing for some obscure reason as well: how will you know?
• Perhaps your infrastructure was not configured well from the start, like 95% of the companies we work with?

One platform to offload it all

We get it. There are a lot of questions and things to keep track of. We know because we've been there before. We've built startups that had millions of dollars in revenue tied up with email deliverability. It's a lot, especially for smaller teams.

That's why we're automating email deliverability. Think of it like a Zapier-like software, where you simply choose the apps you work with, the DNS manager you use, and we do all the configuration and maintenance for you. Just one simple dash to look at now:

In a nutshell:

• We configure, maintain, and optimize your email configuration as often as needed (SPF, DKIM, DMARC, BIMI).
• We deploy, monitor, and update your DMARC policy for you.
• We then send you ultra-digestible information upon request or periodically: an Email Deliverability Score that encompasses tons of data points about your deliverability.
• We make sure you are and stay BIMI compliant.
• We renew and deploy your VMC certificate automatically.
• On top of that, as Entrust Partners, we even give you a discount on the VMC renewal.

We replace all these manual interactions & tools:

• DNS configuration, compliance, and maintenance
• Google Postmaster
• Placement Tests
• Reputation checkers
• Spam checkers
• DMARC Monitoring
• Mail testers

Would you like to be alerted instantly if something were to start degrading your email deliverability?

Or would you rather wait until your sender's reputation goes down the drain and have your emails go to spam for months? I know it happens, I’ve been there and have missed out on millions of dollars in revenue.

What we've found is that anywhere from SMB/startups to mid-market, founders or sales/marketers are usually the ones setting up the email tools. And when that happens, they are scared of touching anything that relates to DNS. Then they ask engineering and developers.

These guys don’t want to touch that either. It’s not their area of expertise, would require a lot of research and reading of documentation that is usually hard to find. Developers dread to do and learn that. They want to build products, not do system admin work.

Do you want to invest your precious (and expensive) engineers' time to learn about all that boring stuff?

Or would you rather have a bunch of nerds like us automate this for you and send you easy-to-read reports so you can rest easy? Would you like to make sure your deliverability is tight before sending your latest campaign with lots of revenues on the line?

This is why we are building Palisade. I was explaining it to a really smart VC last week and his conclusion was “I didn’t understand what you guys were building at first, but now it just makes sense. It’s boring but will solve such a common pain and have founders and operators get that off their plate”.

Let’s be real

Do you really want to check all these every time, or would you rather offload, sleep at night, and not worry about it again?

We know budgets can be tight, and we often have the superman syndrome where we think we can solve all problems internally. I am a huge victim of that myself. With time, I’ve learned that some battles are better left to others. Email deliverability is one of them.

?? Improve your Email Deliverability Score here!