Boost Retention 5–10 pts: AMS Insurance Renewal Reminders for Agencies
AMS first playbook for independent agencies: start 90 days out with email, SMS, and calls, respect TCPA, and aim for 5–10 point retention lift.
Fix authentication and stop sending to unverified addresses. Do those two things and inbox placement improves fastest. That means auditing SPF, DKIM, and DMARC across every sending source, then cleaning your list before your next campaign. Upriser recommends running an authentication check and a seed test before any large send, because the three technical categories that break placement most often are authentication, list quality, and sending pattern.
TL;DR:
- Properly setting up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records and reviewing reports prevent silent authentication failures that can severely harm inbox placement.
- Maintaining permission-based lists and suppressing inactive or bounced addresses immediately protects your sender reputation.
- Gradually warming up new domains and IPs over several weeks helps build trust and avoids damaging volume spikes.
- Segmenting seed tests across Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo ensures tailored adjustments to each provider’s filtering criteria, improving overall deliverability.
- Prioritizing authentication, list hygiene, and consistent warm-up routines delivers the best results, as content and timing matter far less when initial delivery is broken.
Delivery means a mailbox provider accepted your message. Deliverability means the message actually reached the inbox, not the spam folder or a black hole where the recipient never sees it. Litmus points out that mail can be technically “delivered” and still get buried, which is why inbox placement, not delivery rate, is the number that matters.
Mailbox providers like Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo lean on three signal categories to decide where a message lands:
When placement slips, the damage compounds. Open rates drop, click-through rates fall, and conversions follow, because a message sitting in spam does zero work no matter how good the offer is.
Authentication is non-negotiable for anyone sending marketing or outreach email at volume. Proofpoint’s research is blunt about this: missing or misaligned records will tank inbox placement, and major providers now require proper authentication from bulk senders outright.
Here’s the setup sequence:
To confirm everything works, pull the raw headers on a test send and look for spf=pass, dkim=pass, and dmarc=pass. If any of them fail, that’s your starting point for troubleshooting.
Pro Tip: Don’t jump straight to p=reject. Sitting in p=none for a few weeks first lets you catch a forgotten sending tool before it gets silently blocked.
Every address on your list is either an asset or a liability. There’s no neutral middle ground, which is why permission matters more than volume.
Start at capture. Use double opt-in or another strong verification step when someone joins your list, and never buy or rent a list. Purchased lists are full of spam traps, and one spam trap hit can damage a domain’s reputation for months.
Once addresses are in your system, run them through email verification at import and suppress hard bounces immediately, not at the end of the month. A hard bounce means the address doesn’t exist, and continuing to mail it signals sloppy list management to the receiving server.
For contacts who’ve gone quiet, build a short re-engagement series, three to four emails asking if they still want to hear from you, and permanently suppress anyone who doesn’t respond. Holding on to disengaged addresses out of hope drags down your engagement rate and tells mailbox providers your content isn’t wanted.
Finally, honor every unsubscribe or opt-out request the moment it arrives, and include one-click unsubscribe headers on all bulk mail. This isn’t just good manners. It keeps complaint rates low, and complaint rate is one of the metrics mailbox providers weigh most heavily when deciding where your next message lands.
New domains and IPs have no history, and mailbox providers treat unknown senders with suspicion by default. Warming up gradually is how you build the trust that gets your mail into the inbox instead of the junk folder.
A workable ramp looks like this:
Warming works because early engagement from people who already want your mail builds a positive signal fast. A spike in volume with no engagement history does the opposite.
One caveat worth flagging: warm-up networks and automated warm-up tools can establish a baseline, but mailbox providers are getting better at spotting synthetic warm-up patterns. Treat warm-up as an on-ramp, not a permanent fix for a weak list.
Shared IPs make sense for lower-volume senders since you inherit a pool’s existing reputation, good or bad. Dedicated IPs give you full control but require warming from zero, so they only pay off once you’re sending consistent, sizable volume.
Filters score more than just your subject line. Structure and balance matter just as much as wording.
Clean, well-structured HTML paired with personalized subject lines and content tends to outperform generic blasts on both filter scoring and actual engagement.
Watching the right numbers catches problems before they tank a whole campaign. Aim for spam complaints well under 0.3% and hard bounces under roughly 2%, the thresholds most deliverability guidance converges on.
Run this audit monthly at minimum, and immediately after any change to your sending setup.
When placement drops, work through the diagnosis in order rather than guessing.
Pro Tip: Before you touch your template or copy, rule out authentication and list problems first. Most sudden placement drops trace back to a technical break, not a content issue.
Bounces and complaints are the two signals mailbox providers watch most closely after authentication, and how you handle both determines whether a rough week turns into a long-term reputation problem.
Bounces split into two categories. A soft bounce means a temporary issue, a full inbox or a server timeout, and a few retries are fine. A hard bounce means the address doesn’t exist, and it should be suppressed immediately, not after a batch job runs later. Continuing to mail dead addresses is one of the fastest ways to convince a mailbox provider you’re careless about your list.
Complaints matter even more. A feedback loop (FBL) is a mechanism some mailbox providers offer that reports back when a recipient marks your mail as spam. If your ESP supports FBL integration, use it, and suppress anyone who complains without exception. One complaint from a real recipient carries far more weight with a mailbox provider than dozens of unopened emails.
Unsubscribe handling deserves the same discipline. Process opt-out requests immediately, not within the “10 business days” window some senders quietly stretch. Include the one-click unsubscribe header now required by major providers, and never require a login or multi-step form to opt out. Every friction point you add to unsubscribing increases the odds someone hits “report spam” instead, since that’s often faster than hunting for your unsubscribe link.
Keep suppression lists synced across every platform you send from. A contact who unsubscribed through your ESP but still receives transactional mail from a separate system creates the same complaint risk as never honoring the request at all.
Each major mailbox provider filters mail with a different emphasis, and treating them identically is a common mistake.
Gmail weighs engagement heavily. It tracks how often recipients open, reply to, star, or move your mail out of spam, and it factors in domain and IP reputation over time rather than judging each send in isolation. Gmail’s bulk sender requirements now require SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for anyone sending more than roughly 5,000 messages a day, along with a complaint rate that stays low and easy one-click unsubscribing.
Outlook (Microsoft 365 and Outlook.com) leans more on sender reputation databases and IP history, and it’s historically been stricter about blacklisting IPs quickly, sometimes for issues that wouldn’t trigger a Gmail block. Recovery on Outlook, through their Smart Network Data Services (SNDS) and Junk Mail Reporting Program, tends to take longer than a comparable Gmail fix.
Yahoo filters aggressively on content patterns and complaint rate, and it’s known for being less forgiving of sudden volume spikes from unfamiliar senders. Yahoo and AOL share infrastructure, so a reputation problem on one often shows up on both simultaneously.
The practical takeaway: don’t optimize for one provider and assume the rest follow. Segment your seed test list across all three, watch each one’s placement separately, and adjust the sending pattern for whichever domain shows friction rather than applying a blanket fix.
Cadence and volume patterns tell mailbox providers as much about you as your content does. A sender who mails consistently, say twice a week, every week, builds a predictable pattern that filters learn to trust. A sender who goes silent for six weeks and then blasts the full list in one day looks exactly like a compromised account or a spammer testing a new domain.
Sudden spikes are the single most common self-inflicted deliverability wound. If you’re planning a big send, whether it’s a product launch or a re-engagement campaign to a dormant segment, ramp into it over several days rather than firing the whole list at once. Spreading volume across more sending mailboxes and domains, instead of pushing more mail through fewer accounts, keeps any single sender identity from looking like the source of a spike.
Irregular cadence also weakens the engagement signal mailbox providers rely on. A recipient who gets mail from you sporadically is less likely to remember signing up, which increases the odds they ignore it or mark it as spam instead of opening it. Consistency, even at a lower volume, tends to outperform occasional large bursts on engagement metrics that matter for reputation.
Keep your transactional and marketing streams separate, too. A marketing sending problem shouldn’t be able to throttle your order confirmations or password resets, which is one reason treating transactional and marketing email as genuinely different systems protects your most critical mail from getting caught in a broader deliverability issue.
Transport Layer Security (TLS) encrypts the connection between sending and receiving mail servers, and while it’s technically a security feature, it’s become a deliverability factor too. Major mailbox providers increasingly treat unencrypted connections as a signal of an outdated or poorly maintained sending setup.
Most reputable ESPs and SMTP providers enable TLS by default, but if you’re running your own mail server or a custom SMTP configuration, confirm TLS is enforced rather than optional. An unencrypted connection doesn’t just risk interception. It can affect how receiving servers score the legitimacy of the connection itself.
Beyond TLS, a few security basics protect your sending reputation indirectly. Keep your domain’s DNS records locked down against unauthorized changes, since a compromised DNS setting can let someone else send spoofed mail that damages your reputation before you even notice. Monitor for open relays or exposed SMTP credentials, both classic ways a domain gets hijacked for spam campaigns without the owner’s knowledge.
None of this replaces authentication or list hygiene as a priority, but it closes a gap that’s easy to overlook. A domain with perfect SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records can still suffer if the underlying connection or credentials are compromised, and providers are paying closer attention to that whole picture, not just the DNS records.
If you only fix three things this month, fix them in this order: authentication, list hygiene, warm-up. Everything else, subject lines, send times, template design, matters far less than these three when placement is actually broken.
Most teams get this backward. They rewrite subject lines and redesign templates while ignoring a failed DMARC alignment that’s been quietly routing mail to spam for months. Technical fixes are unglamorous, but they’re where the real leverage sits.
Doing this in-house works fine if you have someone who can read a DMARC report and isn’t afraid of DNS records. If your team is stretched thin or you’re managing engagement across email, SMS, and other channels at once, a platform that handles authentication monitoring and engagement tracking together saves real time. Either way, start with an authentication audit this week, not next quarter.
— Brent
Upriser gives you one less thing to babysit: instead of juggling authentication checks, engagement tracking, and multichannel follow-up across separate tools, you get automated voice, video, SMS, and email working from the same customer data and the same reputation signals.
Because Upriser combines personalized video with automated email and SMS, businesses using the platform have seen click-through rates jump by 300%, a direct result of messages that feel relevant instead of generic, which is exactly the engagement signal mailbox providers reward. Teams in hospitality, gyms, insurance, and property services benefit most, especially once campaign volume grows past what manual authentication checks and spreadsheet-based list hygiene can keep up with.
If your team is already handling the technical fixes but wants engagement and deliverability working together instead of managed separately, take a look at Upriser’s platform overview and see which package fits your industry.
