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What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Ruari Baker, Co-Founder and CEO of Allegrow.

Summary: Your fancy AI personalization messaging strategy doesn’t mean anything if you don’t also have a strategy for email deliverability. Ruari busts long-standing myths about HTML vs plain text, why open rates died with Apple’s 2021 privacy changes, and why the spam complaints visible in your marketing platform represent a fraction of reality. You’ll walk away with 3 deliverability tactics that will help you reach the inbox and stay there: implement multi-subdomains to isolate high-risk traffic, adopt contact risk scoring that transcends basic validation and start using Google Postmaster to see your actual reputation metrics. Escape the promo tab without sacrificing design, resurrect damaged domains, and find out why traditional seed testing is worthless. If you depend on email, this might be the best 40 minutes you’ll spend this month.

In This Episode…

• Plain Text Emails Will Always Outperform HTML Emails When it Comes to Inbox Placement
• How to Escape Google Promotions Tab Prison Without Sacrificing Design
• Email Open Rates Died in 2021 and Marketers Need to Get Over It
• Why Your Email Platform Underreports Spam Complaints
• Domain Resurrection After Email Deliverability Death
• Email Validation Isn’t Enough Anymore You Need a Risk Score for Every Recipient
• Why Seed List Testing is Virtually Meaningless to Measure Inbox Placement
• The 3 Most Important Things You Can Do for Email Deliverability: Postmaster, Multi-Subdomains and Cleaning Lists

About Ruari

• Ruari started entrepreneurship early (at 18 years old) and joined a startup accelerator where he received mentorship from top tech founders in the UK as well as his first investment
• He co-founded Direct Software, a GDPR-first marketing automation solution where he gained a deep understanding of email deliverability
• Today, Ruari is Co-Founder and CEO of Allegrow, an email deliverability platform to help emails reach the primary inbox, not the spam folder

How to Maximise Your Odds of Landing in the Primary Inbox

Plain Text Emails Will Always Outperform HTML Emails When it Comes to Inbox Placement

The HTML vs text email question hangs over every marketer’s campaign planning session like a dark cloud. Ruari slices through this persistent debate with razor-sharp clarity. Context dictates winners here, not blanket rules. For outbound sales, plain text creates an authenticity that HTML instantly kills. Think about it—you craft personal emails without fancy formatting. The second your recipient spots that polished design, their brain categorizes your message as “marketing material,” and your personalization efforts crumble.

“You can’t just simply say ‘always plain text, that’s better.’ The reality is there are still good business reasons for using Rich HTML, and that’s why it is such a popular way to send emails from a marketing perspective.”

Email providers have learned to associate complex formatting with promotional content that users often ignore. Your deliverability suffers accordingly. Yet HTML emails persist for good reason:

• Large subscriber lists benefit from HTML’s clickthrough tracking capabilities
• E-commerce companies generate higher engagement when customers see products directly
• Visual brands communicate their identity more effectively through designed templates
• Data-heavy messages become more scannable with proper formatting and hierarchy

The winning strategy lives somewhere in the messy middle. “If you’re using HTML for legitimate marketing emails to an opted-in list, implement these practices to maintain deliverability,” Ruari advises. Clean your entire list monthly—remove invalid contacts, keep bounce rates low, and eliminate potential spam trap subscriptions. This simple 30-day hygiene ritual dramatically improves your sender reputation with both ESPs and inbox systems.

HTML devotees should strategically incorporate plain text messages at key points in the subscriber journey. These unadorned communications slip past promotion folder algorithms, landing you in the primary inbox. This placement success creates a virtuous cycle, improving future message placement—even for your HTML campaigns. You must also implement a sunset policy for engagement maintenance. When subscribers show zero activity over your predetermined period, place them into a final-attempt workflow. No response? Remove them proactively. This keeps your engagement metrics healthy, the exact data points email providers scrutinize when judging your sending quality.

“I once worked with an e-commerce client who switched half their abandoned cart emails to plain text,” Ruari shares. “Their revenue per email jumped 22% because more messages reached the primary inbox.” The results speak volumes about matching format to objective rather than defaulting to what looks prettiest in your marketing dashboard.

Key takeaway: Match email format to specific objectives. Use plain text for sales outreach and relationship-building. Deploy HTML strategically for e-commerce and visual campaigns. Maintain ruthless list hygiene by removing invalid contacts monthly, sending occasional plain text messages regardless of your primary format, and cutting unengaged subscribers after final reactivation attempts. Your deliverability—and ultimately your results—depend on this discipline.

Back to the top ⬆️

Create a Sunset Policy Based on Your Specific Industry Engagement Patterns

Your email list contains a ticking time bomb of disengaged contacts that silently damage your sender reputation with every campaign. When asked about the right timeframe for removing inactive subscribers, Ruari offers a refreshingly nuanced take that shatters the “six-month rule” most marketers blindly follow. The optimal sunset policy timing depends entirely on your industry and baseline engagement metrics. Smart marketers look to identify and remove the bottom quartile or decile of subscribers based on engagement patterns specific to their audience.

High-engagement industries demand different standards than low-engagement sectors. Imagine running email marketing for a compliance software company—a field few people find “sexy.” Your engagement metrics naturally run lower than consumer brands, but those rare engagement spikes matter tremendously. When someone suddenly engages with your SOC 2 audit content after months of silence, that signals a critical buying window. Cutting them off after six months of inactivity would sacrifice valuable revenue opportunities unique to your industry cycle.

You must establish internal benchmarks that reflect your specific business reality. Study your engagement patterns over 12-18 months. Look for natural dropoff points. Analyze which inactive subscribers eventually reactivate and what triggers that behavior. Create segments based on these findings, then craft sunset workflows that reflect the actual customer journey in your space. For some businesses, 90 days makes sense. For others, 12 months barely captures their sales cycle.

“At least having some sunset policy in place would already put you leaps and bounds ahead of the majority of your peers.”

The mere existence of a sunset policy puts you “leaps and bounds ahead of the majority of your peers,” Ruari points out. Most marketers obsessively protect their list size, treating subscriber counts as a vanity metric rather than focusing on engagement quality. They hoard inactive emails like digital dragons, destroying deliverability in the process. Your sunset policy doesn’t need to be perfect—it simply needs to exist and run consistently. Start by removing obvious dead weight: bounced addresses, spam complaints, and truly inactive accounts. Then refine your approach as you gather more data about your specific audience patterns.

Key takeaway: Create a sunset policy based on your specific industry engagement patterns rather than arbitrary timeframes. Identify your bottom-performing subscriber segment (by quartile or decile) and implement an automated workflow to either re-engage or remove them. Even an imperfect sunset policy executed consistently will dramatically improve your deliverability metrics and campaign effectiveness compared to never removing inactive subscribers.

How to Escape Google Promotions Tab Prison Without Sacrificing Design

You send a gorgeous HTML email campaign, packed with stunning visuals of your product. Hours of design work, perfect copy, beautiful imagery. Then reality hits—Google immediately banishes it to the Promotions tab graveyard where open rates plummet by 45%. This frustrating contradiction plagues marketers daily: visually rich emails drive engagement but rarely reach primary inboxes.

The moment you add three or four images to your email, Google’s algorithms make an instant judgment: “This looks promotional.” Your carefully crafted message gets sorted away from the important stuff. The data tells a brutal story—plain text emails consistently reach more people, generating higher total clicks through sheer visibility advantage. You feel the tension in every campaign: should you prioritize getting seen or looking good?

Using WordPress.com as an example, they showcased different website designs through visual campaigns, they discovered something counterintuitive. People who actually saw the HTML emails engaged more deeply with the visuals. The images created powerful reconnection moments with their audience. You face this maddening choice with every send:

• Send plain text for primary inbox placement but sacrifice visual appeal
• Create beautiful HTML emails that land in promo tab purgatory
• Risk spam folder exile with overly aggressive image-heavy designs

Ruari suggests a pragmatic solution that works for legitimate opt-in communications. Permission changes everything. Your HTML newsletters to subscribers rarely trigger deliverability problems, while similar messages to cold prospects immediately raise spam flags. Try this hybrid approach:

1. Use HTML emails as your standard format for visual impact
2. Schedule plain text messages quarterly to maintain algorithmic favor
3. Monitor your inbox placement metrics religiously
4. Adjust your image-to-text ratio based on performance data

“The moment you land in the spam folder, you’ve crossed a line of repeated bad behavior. It’s not an accident – it’s the culmination of trap hits, unsubscribes, and spam reports. You don’t stumble into spam jail; you earn your way there through digital negligence.”

Understanding the inbox hierarchy makes the stakes crystal clear. Primary inbox placement represents marketing gold: immediate visibility and attention. The Promotions tab exists in a strange middle zone: technically within the inbox but dramatically reducing visibility. Your worst nightmare is the spam folder, triggered by sustained negative signals like trap hits, excessive unsubscribes, and spam reports. Every design choice pushes you toward one of these destinations.

Key takeaway: Create an intentional email cadence mixing mostly visually appealing HTML messages with strategic plain text communications. This balanced approach maintains inbox visibility while leveraging visual persuasion. Track your delivery metrics obsessively and adjust your image usage based on what drives both placement and engagement for your specific audience.

Why You Need to Rethink Email Marketing Metrics

Email Open Rates Died in 2021 and Marketers Need to Get Over It

Email open rates tell you absolutely nothing about how many people actually open your emails anymore. Zero. Zilch. Nothing. This uncomfortable reality leaves marketers clinging to a metric that’s fundamentally broken, desperately trying to extract meaning from statistical noise. The culprits are a perfect storm of privacy features and technology changes that have rendered traditional tracking methods useless.

“It really means that open tracking as a statistic is unreliable at best. Now I personally view it as still being an indicator of deliverability, and how it’s changing. So we don’t have it enabled for our outbound campaigns at Allegrow and we don’t advise people should have it enabled for that, but we do always have it enabled for deals that are in the pipeline and there’s some good reasons why.”

Apple’s iOS 15 update in 2021 completely demolished open rate accuracy by preloading all images automatically, creating astronomical false positives for Apple users. Simultaneously, Microsoft Defender and Outlook actively strip tracking pixels from incoming messages. Security providers across the industry have joined the anti-tracking crusade, systematically blocking the very technology marketers rely on to measure engagement. You’re essentially flying blind with a broken instrument panel if you’re still interpreting open rates at face value.

Despite this apocalyptic state of affairs, Ruari sees surprising value in this broken metric when used correctly. “We should be comfortable with the fact that it’s not correct and still extract value from it,” he explains. Open rates maintain worth as a relative indicator of deliverability trends. The logic works like this:

• Your open rates are always wrong – but likely wrong by a consistent degree
• Significant drops (like 50% to 25%) signal real deliverability or engagement problems 
• Click data alone proves insufficient when baseline rates hover around 1-3%
• Intent signals from reopened emails provide valuable sales intelligence

For B2B companies, open tracking creates tangible sales opportunities. When prospects who ghosted six months ago suddenly revisit old email threads (triggering those tracking pixels), it creates perfect moments for follow-up. “If I see a bunch of open activity on those old messages, that tells our team to prioritize calling this person,” Ruari shares. This practical application transforms a flawed metric into a valuable sales intelligence tool.

Most marketers want absolutes – either perfect metrics they can trust completely or utterly useless garbage they can ignore with righteous indignation. The messy reality lives somewhere in between. You need a pragmatic middle ground: track click rates as your primary engagement measure, monitor spam rates for deliverability truth, and use open rates as directional signals rather than absolute benchmarks. Accept the imperfection, extract the value where it exists, and move forward with clearer expectations.

Key takeaway: Stop viewing open rates as accurate measurements of actual opens. Instead, use them as relative indicators of deliverability trends and intent signals for sales follow-up opportunities. Shift your primary focus to click-through rates and spam metrics while maintaining open tracking for its secondary benefits in prospect prioritization.

Why Your Email Platform Underreports Spam Complaints

Unsubscribes get all the attention while spam reports silently destroy your sender reputation in the background. This misplaced focus leads countless marketing teams down a path of deliverability destruction. When someone hits unsubscribe, they’re actually doing you a favor – removing themselves from your list without damaging your reputation. They’ve politely declined further communications. The real danger lurks in those spam reports you’re likely not tracking properly.

Most marketers don’t realize a brutal truth: the spam complaint numbers you see in your marketing automation platform represent only a fraction of reality. Ruari explains, “The spam report number that you’re seeing is the number of people who use the unsubscribe functionality that your marketing system has, and said they thought it was spam. Most often, it isn’t the number of people that actually manually reported the email as spam.” You think you have a 0.1% spam rate? The actual number could be 5x higher.

Email providers intentionally obscure the full picture of spam complaints to protect user privacy. Google, Microsoft, and others won’t tell you exactly who reported your messages – they’ll just quietly decrease your deliverability until you’re screaming into the void. You need multiple data sources to piece together what’s actually happening. Ruari recommends two practical approaches:

• Monitor how often your test emails automatically land in spam folders
• Use free tools like Google Postmaster Tools to track percentage-based spam reports
• Watch for sudden spikes in complaints that indicate problematic campaigns
• Remember that zero complaints might mean you’re already in spam purgatory

The most counterintuitive insight? A low spam report rate in Google Postmaster Tools can actually signal disaster. “If your messages are already landing in spam, you can’t get reported. So the best way by that logic to have a 0% spam rate is to already send there,” Ruari points out. You might celebrate that clean report while your messages rot unread in spam folders across the internet. Google even acknowledges this in their documentation – once you’re blacklisted, they stop counting new complaints because your fate is already sealed.

Your deliverability health requires vigilant monitoring from multiple angles. The moment you see a spike in spam reports, take immediate action before the damage becomes irreversible. Remember that single bad campaign can trigger a punishment cycle: high complaints → spam folder placement → fewer visible complaints → false sense of security. Breaking free requires understanding that the metrics you see tell only half the story of your email reputation.

Key takeaway: Stop obsessing over unsubscribe rates and start tracking true spam complaints through multiple data sources like Google Postmaster Tools and automated spam folder tests. Watch for complaint spikes followed by suspicious drops, which often indicate you’ve been relegated to spam folders. Remember that zero visible complaints might mean you’re already trapped in deliverability hell, not that your campaigns are performing well.

Email Reputation Recovery And Prevention Methods

Domain Resurrection After Email Deliverability Death

Cold outreach can damage your domain’s deliverability without marketing’s knowledge. Sales contacting non-opted-in prospects creates negative signals affecting all company emails—even legitimate ones go to spam. Without proper domain separation between outbound sales and other channels, one department compromises everyone’s email performance, explaining why permission-based campaigns fail despite following best practices.

But deliverability issues aren’t isolated to just outbound activity. A lot of email marketers have been there too. 

Your Postmaster Tools dashboard just flashed red. Heart sinking, palms sweaty, you stare at the screen. That old ebook download list you just blasted has torpedoed your sender reputation overnight. Your carefully cultivated domain status now sits somewhere between “suspicious character” and “digital pariah.” You need answers, fast.

Ruari cuts through the desperate search for quick fixes with brutal honesty. “Bring the automated volume right down,” he states flatly. No magic bullet, no clever workaround. Volume reduction forms your first lifeline:

• Slash sending volume by at least 50% immediately
• Prioritize inbound and essential business communications
• Temporarily halt marketing and sales outreach campaigns

The subdomain question haunts every marketer in reputation crisis. Your path forward depends on what infrastructure you already use. Burned your core domain? Create a fresh subdomain exclusively for promotional content. Already using a marketing subdomain? Focus rehabilitation efforts there rather than starting anew. Either way, prepare for the slow burn – reputation recovery demands 30-60 days of methodical action.

Your resurrection protocol requires surgical precision. Begin with your most engaged subscribers, those who consistently open, click, and convert. Their positive engagement signals help rebuild algorithmic trust. Gradually expand to include your second and third-tier segments as positive metrics accumulate. You feel the urge to accelerate this timeline – resist it. Patience buys you long-term deliverability.

Contact evaluation transforms from nice-to-have into mission-critical. Every email address entering your system demands rigorous scrutiny. Your new system must:

1. Risk-analyze each contact before sending
2. Filter out invalid addresses proactively
3. Identify potential spam traps before they trigger
4. Catch problematic patterns that mirror your previous downfall

With verification guardrails firmly established and genuinely valuable content flowing through your campaigns, your original domain can shake off its damaged reputation. You earn back trust one carefully considered send at a time. Your domain slowly climbs from purgatory back to good standing – provided you maintain these heightened standards moving forward.

Key takeaway: After your email reputation crashes, implement immediate volume reduction, establish a clean subdomain if needed, and verify every contact rigorously. Follow a strict 30-60 day warming sequence starting with your most engaged subscribers. Trust rebuilds through consistency and restraint, not shortcuts or volume-based approaches.

Email Validation Isn’t Enough Anymore You Need a Risk Score for Every Recipient

Your email marketing dies on the vine when too many recipients mark you as spam. Ruari’s team built a risk scoring system that transcends old-school validation by examining both technical and behavioral factors before you hit send. They generate contact-level risk ratings, then guide your outreach strategy based on those scores—keeping your domain reputation pristine while maximizing response rates.

“We conduct every technical check to assess the risk of the contact,” Ruari explains, starting with basic SMTP validation to confirm whether recipients still exist at their companies. Your prospects’ email servers reveal crucial clues about their status, flagging those who’ve changed jobs before you waste a message on them.

“Most validation tools just tell you if an address exists. We go deeper. We track if that person actively blocks marketing emails. We monitor their response patterns across millions of inboxes. You’re not just finding out if they’ll receive your message—you’re discovering if they’re likely to tank your entire email reputation with a single spam report.”

But modern email security throws wrenches into traditional validation methods. Many servers now block legacy SMTP checks entirely. Ruari’s system adapts:

• They evaluate email validity even on servers that block conventional validation
• They access historical data showing which contacts mark similar outreach as spam
• They connect directly to millions of B2B inboxes, not just server-side information

This direct connectivity creates their competitive edge. While traditional validation services rely solely on SMTP server checks, Ruari’s company taps into actual B2B email accounts. “We connect to every user’s real B2B inbox,” he notes, “and we’re able to see their prospecting patterns and email traffic every day across millions of data points.”

The system transforms raw data into actionable intelligence. You learn which contacts exist AND which ones pose high risk to your campaigns. Cold outreach becomes surgical—you can customize messaging based on risk levels, skip the riskiest contacts altogether, or adjust sending patterns to protect your domain. Your deliverability rates climb while complaint rates plummet, creating sustainable email marketing programs that actually reach inboxes.

Key takeaway: Implement contact-level risk scoring that evaluates both technical validity and recipient behavior patterns before sending. Look beyond basic validation to identify which prospects might damage your sender reputation with spam complaints.

Why Seed List Testing is Virtually Meaningless to Measure Inbox Placement

Your boss wants inbox placement numbers. You run a seed test. You report 95% deliverability. You sleep well… while your actual emails rot in spam folders across your database. Ruari witnessed this exact scenario play out countless times before building Allegrow. “Those inboxes that the message gets sent to for seed testing are fake,” he explains, visibly frustrated. Your gorgeous seed list deliverability report is built on a foundation of digital sand.

The standard deliverability testing process feels reassuring but delivers dangerous fiction. You send to server-managed test accounts which:

• Lack actual spam filtering algorithms
• Run on different email providers than your targets
• Remain untouched by human interaction
• Generate artificially inflated results

What happens in these sterile test environments bears zero resemblance to the brutal filtering gauntlet your marketing emails face in the wild. Your real recipients use Microsoft’s aggressive enterprise-grade filters. They deploy Google’s constantly-evolving spam detection. They activate custom rules. Seed tests capture none of this reality.

Allegrow built something radically different. “Every user that joins Allegrow becomes a member of the network,” Ruari explains. Your test emails travel through genuine workplace accounts; the exact same environments where your marketing must perform. When a Fortune 500 company joins their network, you gain visibility into how your emails perform in those ultra-secure corporate environments. The filtering matches reality because it IS reality.

Daily tracking creates another dimension seed tests miss entirely. “You’re interested in the change and direction, not just the top-level number,” Ruari emphasizes. Deliverability exists in perpetual motion. Yesterday’s perfect score means nothing when today’s campaign triggers defensive algorithms. Allegrow automatically reruns these tests every 24 hours through their network of genuine inboxes. You spot the 4% drop that signals trouble brewing. You catch that sudden 15% plunge before customers start complaining. You watch the impact of your fixes in real-time, measuring true improvement rather than guessing.

Key takeaway: Replace artificial seed testing with deliverability measurement through networks of genuine business accounts. Test through the actual email providers your audience uses, monitor daily trends not single-point measurements, and build your email strategy on truth rather than misleading metrics.

Pinpoint Rep-Level Email Problems Before Your Domain Gets Blacklisted

Your marketing team’s deliverability just tanked, but nobody can figure out why. Your brand-new SDR blasted 3,000 cold emails yesterday while the rest of your team played by the rules. Now everyone’s messages are landing in spam—even your carefully crafted newsletter to your best customers. Ruari describes how Allegrow tackles this common deliverability nightmare through surgical precision rather than broad diagnostics.

“The main thing we do nowadays is we essentially look at the data that the customer has and we tell ’em these are the safest contacts to reach out to,” Ruari explains. Their system flags high-risk recipients before you damage your reputation:

• Known spam traps lurking in your database
• Invalid emails that trigger bounce-rate alarms
• Contacts with histories of marking similar messages as spam
• Addresses with suspicious engagement patterns

But Allegrow’s standout capability goes far beyond basic list hygiene. For teams with multiple senders sharing domain reputation, they pinpoint exactly who’s burning down your email house. “We don’t just say, this is your spam rate and this is the top level number. We actually tell you this is where the problem’s happening,” Ruari emphasizes. The system isolates problematic behavior down to individual user accounts, showing you precisely which team members trigger the spam filters.

This granular visibility transforms how managers handle email compliance. “Let’s say I’m a sales manager and I have a team of 50 reps,” Ruari continues. “Usually once per quarter, there’s anywhere from two to three reps that really push the envelope with email activity.” These over-eager senders might double their volume overnight, ignore risk warnings, or copy-paste the same message hundreds of times—all behaviors that poison your entire domain’s reputation. Allegrow spots these patterns, separates their metrics from the team average, and alerts administrators before widespread damage occurs.

You’ve experienced this pain before. A marketing director complains about declining open rates while a sales leader blames your email templates. Meanwhile, nobody notices that three new hires are ignoring playbooks and blasting every contact they can find. Allegrow’s rep-level monitoring cuts through this confusion, showing exactly who needs coaching rather than forcing organization-wide policy changes. The notification system alerts admins to developing problems, allowing targeted interventions instead of company-wide emergency meetings about deliverability.

Key takeaway: Monitor email engagement metrics at the individual sender level, not just domain-wide. Implement systems that isolate problematic senders before their actions damage your entire organization’s deliverability, and create rapid-response protocols for when warning thresholds are crossed.

Email Warmup Tools Fight Uphill Battle Against Industry Skepticism

Many email marketers view warmup services with deep suspicion. They mentally categorize these tools alongside spam enablers and blackhat techniques that game deliverability metrics. “If spammers use these tools, why would I use them too?” The question hangs over the entire category like a dark cloud. Asked about this industry-wide skepticism, Ruari draws a clear line between bad actors and legitimate solutions.

“Allegrow is really more focused on making sure the contacts aren’t risky these days, and telling people when their spam rates are getting worse rather than warmup,” Ruari clarifies. Their core value proposition centers on contact-level risk assessment—preventing you from emailing high-risk recipients in the first place. You can’t force-warm your way into good deliverability if you’re targeting spam traps and known complainers. No amount of technical trickery overcomes fundamentally bad contact selection.

For legitimate users starting fresh domains or subdomains, Allegrow absolutely provides warmup services. New sending environments need gradual introduction to email providers through friendly traffic patterns. Without this careful nurturing, even perfect content struggles to reach inboxes. But their approach diverges dramatically from questionable competitors through:

• Approved integrations with major email providers
• Exclusive focus on verified B2B customers
• Premium positioning that attracts serious businesses
• SOC 2 compliance and formal security audits

These guardrails create critical separation from shadier corners of the industry. The email warmup space suffers from reputation problems because too many vendors accept anyone with a credit card—including obvious spammers trying to circumvent filters. Allegrow’s verification requirements and integration approach shut those doors, focusing exclusively on legitimate senders who want accurate data, not shortcuts.

You’ve likely felt that twinge of skepticism yourself. Even if you’ve seen the tools work, part of you wonders: “Am I gaming the system?” The uncomfortable truth? Yes, slightly. Warmup tools do provide advantages over competitors who don’t use them. But they don’t magically transform spam into welcome content—they simply level the playing field against Gmail’s mysterious algorithms and Microsoft’s aggressive filtering. The real question isn’t whether they give you an advantage, but whether that advantage comes at the expense of recipient experience. When used by genuine marketers sending valuable content, the answer is clearly no.

Key takeaway: Choose email warmup and deliverability tools that focus on contact risk assessment first, with verified B2B-only access and formal security compliance. These guardrails separate legitimate services from questionable operators, ensuring you improve deliverability through proper techniques rather than exploitation of loopholes.

How to Secure Buy-in For Proper Email Hygiene Infrastructure

ROI conversations around email deliverability tools make executives’ eyes glaze over. They nod politely while secretly wondering why they’re spending budget on something that sounds like an IT problem. Ruari cuts through this perception gap with immediate, tangible metrics that connect directly to revenue impact. “The first thing we see is really the number of risky emails we’re stopping for the business,” he explains. Allegrow shows concrete results on day one—upload your list and immediately see how many potential reputation-damaging messages you’ve prevented.

The numbers shock even sophisticated marketing teams. One publicly traded company prevented 70,000 bad emails from being sent over a single year. “It’s really common for businesses that are quite developed to think, ‘oh, we wouldn’t have that issue because we use the best data providers in the world,'” Ruari notes. But without automated, consistent verification systems, dangerous contacts slip through constantly. Your expensive data provider claims 95% accuracy? That still means thousands of risky messages leaving your domain each quarter.

These preventative measures translate directly into performance gains that sales leaders instantly understand. Work Vivo (acquired by Zoom) saw reply rates on outbound emails triple after implementing Allegrow. Other clients report 50% jumps in response rates. You feel this impact viscerally—fewer reps complaining about being ghosted, more prospects engaging, shorter sales cycles when critical messages actually reach decision-makers.

Sometimes it takes a crisis to create urgency. Ruari shares a story about an AI solution provider selling to banks. Their carefully crafted late-stage emails from the head of product—containing roadmap details and similar use cases—frequently missed inboxes entirely. “It’s costing them signed contracts because they don’t have the touch points they need to stay a priority for the prospect,” Ruari explains. Those missed messages created tangible revenue losses that executives couldn’t ignore. You’ve likely experienced this yourself—that crucial follow-up that should have closed the deal, only to discover weeks later it never reached the prospect. Your carefully crafted proposal sits unread in a spam folder while your competitor signs the contract.

Key takeaway: Measure email deliverability impact through concrete metrics that executives care about, like prevented risky sends, improved reply rates, and revenue saved from critical messages that now reach decision-makers. Connect these technical improvements directly to sales outcomes, not just deliverability statistics, to secure buy-in for proper email hygiene infrastructure.

The 3 Most Important Things You Can Do for Email Deliverability: Postmaster, Multi-Subdomains and Cleaning Lists

Email marketers face a tough reality: mastering persuasive copy remains only half the battle. Beneath the surface lurks the technical infrastructure that determines whether your perfectly crafted message reaches its destination or dies in spam folder obscurity. Ruari acknowledges this professional challenge: “Marketers often have less awareness of authentication protocols because they’re delegating that responsibility to the email provider.”

This delegation creates a critical knowledge gap. Your email platform handles the baseline setup, giving you a false sense of security until deliverability suddenly plummets. That’s when the painful truth emerges—you own the results but lack the technical understanding to diagnose what went wrong.

Build your technical foundation with this practical roadmap:

1. Set up Google Postmaster Tools this week. This free dashboard reveals how Gmail evaluates your sending practices. “It gives you more line of sight on spam issues,” Ruari explains. You’ll see actual data on complaint rates, authentication results, and domain reputation—transforming abstract deliverability concepts into actionable metrics you can track and improve.

2. Explore subdomain architecture next. Most organizations funnel everything through a single domain address, creating unnecessary vulnerability. “If you have everything running on one domain with no segmentation, you’re putting more eggs in one basket,” Ruari warns. Your critical transactional messages share fate with your promotional campaigns, creating preventable risk.

Consider creating purpose-specific subdomains—billing.yourcompany.com for financial communications and accounts.yourcompany.com for essential user notifications. This architecture creates protective boundaries between different message types. When marketing campaigns experience delivery issues, your password reset emails still reach their destination.

3. Cleaning your list. Make use of the aforementioned risk scoring for all of your recipients, not just email validation. Your list is probably nowhere near as clean as you think it is. Map all of your list entry points. Double opt-in verification is table stakes in 2025, but lots of folks skip this step. 

You don’t need deep technical expertise to implement these changes, even subdomains, they don’t have to be scary. Begin with focused research on subdomain strategy basics. The actual setup should be straightforward in your email platform. “Let the support team of the email provider handle the nuance,” Ruari suggests. They’ll configure the technical elements while you direct the strategic implementation.

Each incremental improvement builds both your expertise and your email performance. The terminology becomes familiar. The concepts connect to real-world outcomes. Your confidence grows. Within months, you’ve transformed deliverability from your greatest vulnerability into a competitive advantage that separates your campaigns from less technically savvy competitors.

Key takeaway: Strengthen your deliverability expertise by first establishing Google Postmaster Tools to visualize performance issues, then implementing subdomain separation between promotional and transactional email streams. Partner with your email platform’s support team for technical implementation while you develop the strategic understanding that protects your sending reputation.

Structure Your Workday to Batch Context-switching Tasks

Your calendar overflows with meetings. Your inbox screams for attention. Your Slack notifications never stop. Modern entrepreneurship creates crushing pressure to multitask every waking moment. Yet Ruari discovered something counterintuitive about professional satisfaction: happiness doesn’t come from juggling everything simultaneously, but from creating space for singular focus.

“I actually find I get most happiness from focusing in on one thing and not actually doing too much balance in terms of day-to-day,” Ruari explains. This revelation transformed his workday structure. Mornings handle context-switching tasks—the never-ending parade of emails, calls, and fires demanding attention. But afternoons? Those become sacred territory dedicated to deep work on a single priority. This deliberate structure prevents him from being “redirected into focusing on whatever the flow of email traffic is about that day,” creating space to address fundamental challenges rather than just react to noise.

This approach works only with the right foundation—a talented team that can shoulder responsibilities and operate independently. Without colleagues who can run with their own priorities, deep focus becomes impossible. The leader drowns in operational necessities rather than strategic thinking.

Beyond professional structure, Ruari finds personal rejuvenation through regular exploration. “Being able to see a new culture, a new part of the world fairly regularly helps me keep my spirits pretty high,” he shares. These travel experiences—discovering new cuisines, witnessing different lifestyles, absorbing unfamiliar environments—provide both perspective and energy that he carries back into his professional life.

Key takeaway: Structure your workday to batch context-switching tasks in the morning, then dedicate afternoons to deep focus on a single priority. This approach requires building a competent team that can operate independently, but delivers greater professional satisfaction than constant multitasking.

Episode Recap

Email deliverability might be the most criminally underrated element of marketing and growth success today. Most teams obsess over AI-powered personalization and fancy automation sequences, Ruari Baker (Allegrow’s CEO) reveals how those efforts become meaningless when emails land in spam. This episode debunks long-held myths about HTML versus plain text and email marketing metrics. 

Open rates died in 2021 with Apple’s MPP, but marketers still give them too much weight. Ruari explains why they still matter as directional indicators while revealing how the spam report metrics in your marketing platform show only a fraction of actual complaints. 

If you’re facing deliverability disaster, Ruari outlines a comprehensive domain resurrection strategy, but more importantly, prevention tactics you should be putting in place yesterday to avoid getting into hot water. Allegrow has a revolutionary approach to contact risk scoring, like email validation 3.0, by analyzing behavioral patterns across millions of B2B inboxes to identify not just invalid addresses but contacts with histories of reporting and blocking similar outreach—a preventative approach that stopped 70,000 bad emails for one enterprise client alone.

Probably the most compelling segment outlines the 3 most important things you can do to improve your email deliverability. Stop sending emails from your corporate domain and implement a multi-subdomain strategy so you can isolate risky senders to their own email traffic and save your newsletters and lifecycle emails. Take a good hard look at your recipient list, not just establishing a risk factor but also mapping sources of origin and ensuring double opt-ins. Oh and if you haven’t… do yourself a favor and connect Google Postmaster so that you have a much better understanding of your spam complaints. 

Ruari also dismantles the fallacy of seed testing, where marketers send to artificial addresses and get meaningless inbox placement data. Ruari explains how Allegrow fundamentally reimagined deliverability monitoring by creating a network of real business professionals whose active inboxes provide authentic spam filtering signals. Even better, they can pinpoint which specific sales reps are tanking your domain reputation before catastrophic damage occurs. 

This episode is essential listening for anyone whose business depends on email actually reaching human eyeballs.

Listen to the full episode ⬇️ or Back to the top ⬆️

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Intro music by Wowa via Unminus
Cover art created with Midjourney (check out how)

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