📩 Inbox Health, Without the Guesswork

Picture a mid-size retailer that’s doing everything “right”, good creative, solid offers, consistent cadence, and still watching opens slide and bounces creep up. The problem usually isn’t the subject line. It’s the list.

A handful of bad addresses is background noise. A steady drip of them turns into a reputation problem, and reputation is what decides whether you land in the inbox or disappear.

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1) Get strict about where addresses come from
Not all growth is good growth. Track performance by acquisition source and look at engagement, bounces, and complaints side by side. If one channel starts poisoning your metrics, cap it or pause it fast. For partner or 2nd-party lists, validate first and ramp slowly using only your healthiest segment.

2) Validate at the front door
The cheapest bounce is the one you never send. Add real-time checks at signup and checkout: syntax, mailbox existence, and risk scoring. Block disposable addresses, role-based inboxes, and obvious typos (like misspelled domains). If you ingest addresses from registrations or partners, require the same validation before they hit your system.

3) Treat bounces like signals, not trash
Hard bounces: suppress immediately.
Soft bounces: retry with a plan, not forever. Two to three attempts across a few days is usually enough, then park the address. For special cases like Yahoo deferrals or Gmail “over quota” errors, throttle, prioritize recent clickers, and retry over time before deciding to suppress.

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4) Make complaints less likely
Complaints can follow an address across brands, and they still count against you. Use reputation and complainer signals where you can. Make your off-ramps painless: one-click unsubscribe and simple preference controls. Watch complaint rate by domain, and pull back when it spikes instead of trying to power through.

5) Clean on a schedule
List decay is normal. Ignoring it isn’t.
Monthly: run hygiene on non-engagers and recent bouncers.
Quarterly: do a deeper sweep across the whole file and suppress chronic soft bouncers.
Before big sends (promos, launches): pre-scan the target segment so you don’t “discover” problems mid-flight.

6) Trim smart so you don’t shrink
When deliverability wobbles, concentrate sends on your Base Sending Segment: the people who’ve engaged recently and consistently. Build a win-back series for everyone else. If they still don’t respond, let them go. Cutting dead weight isn’t losing muscle, it’s how you regain inbox placement.

Deliverability isn’t magic. It’s math plus discipline. Validate early, re-clean often, keep a tight core when things get shaky, and your email program compounds instead of eroding.

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