If you are a marketing leader trying to navigate the choppy waters of email deliverability, you know the feeling. The revenue is dipping, the pressure is mounting, and the inevitable suggestion comes from the top: “We need to send more emails to more people to fill that leaky bucket!”
But here’s the brutal truth I recently discussed with a peer facing this exact crisis: In the modern inbox, sending more emails to fix a problem doesn't just fail to plug the hole, it actively punches new ones.
To this person's credit, they knew the right actions to take, as do so many others in the field of emails and marketing automation, and the situation they faced is not one that is unique, by a long shot.
The situation my peer faced was classic, painful, and relatable to any industry: They saw a sudden, dramatic migration of nearly all their email volume into Gmail's Promotions tab, immediately choking off engagement and sales. The immediate reaction of their leadership team is to pressure for more volume. This still being a common mindset among business leaders, and why I decided to write this blog.
Today, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Google and Yahoo have become expert email filters. They want to see people using their platform to engage and they are working to provide their users with the most engaging content they can. To be in the mix you've got to engage your audience, and maintain good sending practices.
As this is something still impacting my fellow email marketing professionals out there, here are some ways to help transition away from a volume-based strategy and, most importantly, how to get non-technical leadership to not just approve the change, but champion it.
When faced with a revenue drop, the instinct to increase volume is understandable. If 50% of the emails aren't working, surely we should try 100%? The data however, tells a devastating, zero-sum story.
For this particular business, a high volume sender, when they hit their peak promotional season, the deliverability issues began. This wasn’t a coincidence; it was a consequence.
The ISP Mandate: Google and Yahoo now require bulk senders (those sending over 5,000 messages per day) to maintain a user-reported spam complaint rate strictly below 0.3%. The optimal rate for safe delivery is even lower, ideally below 0.1%.
The Zero-Sum Outcome: When you increase volume and send messages to unengaged, high-risk subscribers, the inevitable result is more users clicking "Report Spam." That action instantly pushes the sender past the 0.3% threshold.
The Consequence: Once that threshold is breached, the ISP doesn't just filter a few bad emails; they apply a reputation penalty to the entire sending domain, which is why nearly 100% of the peer’s emails went to the Promotions tab .
The Key Insight: High volume to the wrong people is what breaches the spam rate limit, making the entire list ineffective. Every extra, irrelevant send actively contributes to the destruction of the email channel. Also, the highly promotional nature of the emails increased their appearance to Google as promotional messages. This may sound obvious, and of course it makes sense to think that, however if the algorithms see engagement and accept promotions are never the less what the customer wants to see, the primary inbox can start to open up again.
The solution requires two concurrent actions: stabilising the sender reputation through mandatory compliance and executing a quality-focused content strategy.
These are table stakes for bulk senders and should be framed as Business Continuity.
Mandatory Authentication: Immediately implement and verify DMARC, SPF, and DKIM. These are technical prerequisites for delivery. Failure to do so means emails will simply be rejected outright. Platforms like Klaviyo are great are making sure this is simple to achieve.
Spam Rate Control: Use tools like Postmaster Tools to monitor the spam rate daily . The single most protective action is segmenting out and halting sends to unengaged subscribers who haven't opened or clicked in 6–12 months.
Easy Exit: Implement the one-click unsubscribe mechanism in the email header and body immediately. Making it easy to leave is the best way to prevent a user from clicking "Report Spam."
To earn Primary Inbox placement, you need to try and convince the ISPs that your content is valuable, not merely promotional.
Text-Optimised Content: Move away from complex, graphics-heavy HTML layouts toward a minimal, text-optimised aesthetic (aiming for a 40:60 HTML-to-text ratio or better). This mimics a 1:1 communication, signalling high relevance to ISP filters.
Precision Targeting: Stop the bulk sends. Use segmentation based on purchase history and behaviour to ensure every message is deeply relevant. Implement effective automated campaigns, like personalised abandoned cart reminders, which are triggered by customer action and yield high-intent results.
Focused CTAs: Limit promotional emails to 1–3 highly relevant links. Overstuffing emails with product links is an instant signal for the Promotions tab.
You can be the best email strategist in the world, but unless it's your business you will often find yourself pushing against leadership that wants more volume, thinking that will fix the problem. How do you, the marketer, explain that the fix involves cutting volume and focusing on a smaller engaged audience? You must translate technical concepts into executive language: Risk, Efficiency, and Asset Protection.
Here are three pitches to win over leadership and secure the budget for a Quality-First strategy:
The Executive Pitch: “We are facing an existential threat to our email channel. Continuing our current high-volume strategy is like driving without insurance. Google and Yahoo are mandating DMARC authentication and spam rate control as a non-negotiable cost of doing business. We must fund this as a regulatory compliance project, not a marketing project. Failure to comply means a total, permanent loss of access to the majority of our customers' inboxes.”
The Executive Pitch: “Our current list includes a significant number of unengaged subscribers who cost us money to mail and destroy our Sender Reputation through spam complaints and lack of engagement. When we cut volume to the high-risk segments, we are not losing reach; we are dramatically increasing the quality of the reach. We shift from trying to get 50 sales from 100,000 sent emails, to getting 100 sales from 50,000 targeted emails. This is a move toward maximising the ROI on every contact, not just maximising the count.”
The Executive Pitch: “Our most valuable asset is our list of active, engaged customers. The mass-mailing strategy puts this valuable asset at risk by letting the unengaged segments drag down our reputation. We are shifting to a strategy that protects and nurtures the engaged core. We will focus 90% of our volume on the people who actually want our messages, ensuring we have a reliable, high-performing revenue channel for the long term, rather than sacrificing future sales for a short-term, low-return volume push.”
By re-framing the technical necessities into the language of risk and profitability, you can transform the conversation. The goal is simple: show leadership that the way to get more sales is not to put more water in the bucket, but to stop punching holes in the bottom and focus solely on the high-quality channels that lead directly to conversions.
It’s time to stop the zero-sum game.