I have a line I keep coming back to: one unsubscribe is nothing next to one spam complaint. Let people leave if they want to. Chasing a few extra opens is the fastest way to lose the whole list’s trust. 

That’s the same note I opened with on the Keep Optimising podcast, hosted by Chloe Thomas, a weekly show for e-commerce marketers built around five-episode “masterclasses,” each one going deep on a single channel. This episode closed out their email marketing masterclass, and Chloe asked me to come talk about email deliverability. 

I’m Chintan Doshi, Senior Director of Marketing Automation at Mavlers, a team of 800+ people spread across 52+ countries, and most of my days are spent inside Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Braze, Klaviyo, and HubSpot, running lifecycle programs for brands around the world. 

Here’s what the whole conversation kept coming back to: deliverability isn’t a technical problem you patch. It’s what naturally happens when your lifecycle strategy earns your subscribers’ trust. This post walks through the highlights of email deliverability mistakes marketers make, with the full clips embedded as we go, and a link to the entire episode at the end. 

First things first. Let’s talk about email deliverability best practices

Lifecycle strategy is about outcomes, not platform settings

Chloe asked me the obvious opening question: how do I actually define “lifecycle strategy”? And my answer surprised her a little.

I don’t think it has much to do with your Salesforce Marketing Cloud setup, or your Klaviyo flow, or your Iterable journey. Those are tactics. A real strategy is about the business outcome you’re chasing, across email, SMS, push, and in-app together, and what your subscribers actually expect from you in return. Here’s how I broke that down for Chloe:

What a deliverability failure actually costs you

This is the part I wish more marketers sat with. Deliverability failures don’t set off an alarm. Your dashboard still says “delivered.” However, revenue tells a different story.

I walked Chloe through what actually breaks: 

• Paid acquisition spend wasted on subscribers who never see the welcome email
• Transactional messages like OTPs and shipping updates getting blocked
• A/B tests are quietly corrupted, as half the audience never saw the email 

And if your domain reputation takes a real hit, recovery isn’t quick. I’m talking 6 to 12 weeks.

Mailbox providers are scorekeepers, not judges

Here’s an idea I lean on constantly: Inbox trust. Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook aren’t deciding your brand’s fate. They’re reflecting it to you, based on how your actual subscribers behave.

Move an email to primary. Reply to it. Keep opening and clicking. Those are the positive signals that build trust. When you delete it unread or mark it spam, those actions erode it. I told Chloe the mailbox providers are just keeping score. Your subscribers are the ones playing the game.

Open rates are dead, the inbox is getting an AI layer: What’s next

Chloe and I also got into how much the ground has shifted. Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection quietly broke open rate as a metric you can trust: most of those “opens” aren’t real anymore. So what replaces it? First-party signals like clicks, purchases, and replies, plus zero-party data your subscribers hand you willingly.

Then she asked for my crystal ball on the next 6 to 12 months. I gave her a longer list than she expected: AI tools like Gemini and Apple Intelligence condensing your email into a single line before anyone even opens it, the fight for a spot in Apple’s and Gmail’s “Primary” tab, DMARC moving to quarantine or reject as the default, and BIMI going from nice-to-have to a baseline trust signal.

The governance model that actually protects deliverability

When Chloe asked me where to even start, my answer wasn’t a tactic. It was a governance model.

I walked her through seven pieces in lifecycle email marketing governance: 

• Clear ownership that sits across teams and not just the email desk
• Frequency caps set per customer instead of per channel
• Consistent list hygiene and suppression logic
• Explicit consent for every channel separately
• A real win-back-then-sunset process for dormant subscribers
• Proactive monitoring against two hard numbers
• Complaints under 0.1%, hard bounces under 2%, and a pre-defined escalation playbook so nobody’s improvising when reputation drops.

Quality over quantity, and the paid-ads win-back play

I shared a case study here that got a strong reaction from Chloe: a publication client with 12 million subscribers on their list, but only 30% of that list was actually being mailed.

We redefined what “inactive” even means: a subscriber who’s gone quiet on email but still active on your app or site isn’t actually inactive. And instead of blasting dormant users right before Black Friday and risking your domain, I told her what we do instead: pull them out of the ESP entirely, load them into paid social, and try to win them back that way.

Insider tips, fundamentals, RPR over RPC, and where to learn more

Every episode ends with Chloe’s rapid-fire round, and this is where I got to be a little blunt. Get SPF, DKIM, and DMARC set up before you do anything clever. Score your list by clicks and site visits, not opens. Watch Revenue per Recipient, not Revenue per Campaign. RPC hides list decay that RPR shows you immediately.

And if you want to keep learning for free: Chad White’s book, Google Postmaster Tools, and Slack communities like Lifecycle Leaders and Email Geeks are where I’d point you.

Here is the audio podcast of the full episode.

Wrapping up

If there’s one thing I hope stuck with listeners, it’s this: deliverability isn’t a setting you configure once and forget. It’s trust you earn, episode after episode, through a real lifecycle strategy, real governance, and disciplined data hygiene.

I had a great time talking through all of this with Chloe. She asks the right questions, and I hope this recap gives you enough to act on even before you press play.

For everything that didn’t make it into this post, listen to the full episode on Keep Optimising – link. 

And if your team is wrestling with deliverability or lifecycle strategy right now, we’d love to talk it through. Reach out to Mavlers, anytime.