Checklist to Review Email Performance

Review the following for each sender/domain if any performance or reputation issues are observed. It is crucial to evaluate all of these factors when monitoring ramp-up customers, analyzing reputation declines, or assessing progress toward reputation improvement.

All of these must be done for each different sub-domain.

Criteria	Factors to be monitored
Compliance	Are all the compliance requirements met? If not - Pause everything and fix this first.
Email set up	Is the email setup still intact? If not - pause everything from the domain/IP set that has issues and fix that before resuming.
Sent volume	Is the volume in line with the ramp-up plan (if applicable)? If not, pause -> backtrack -> make sure all metrics are intact -> then resume. Was there a volume spike? Volume spike would be sent volume more than 150% of the highest volume sent in the last 30 days. If yes, why did that happen? What has been done to ensure, it doesn’t recur? Send only to email openers with reduced frequency and reach out to each postmaster explaining the cause of the issue and steps taken to recover/prevent it from happening again.
Sending frequency	Are you sending enough times per week/fortnight to keep the IPs warm? If not, try other lifecycle use cases, and reach out to the postmaster to explain why you have sporadic sends. What is the RPM being used? If there are deferrals/delayed delivery/infrequent sends, lower the RPM.
Delivery rate	What is the average delivery rate? If it’s below 98%, review the reasons behind it. If there are high hard bounces, secure audience collection points, implement double opt it, send welcome campaigns, and look whether hard bounces are automatically suppressed as expected or not. If there are high soft bounces, reach the error description, and fix it accordingly.
Deferrals	Are there deferrals [event: Event Deferred]? If yes, pause for a day and clear the queue, resume with lower volumes and low RPM, and reach out to postmaster support.
Open and click rate	Are the Unique open rates across all ISPs on par with the benchmark? If not, revise your sending strategy.
Spam complaints (Gmail)	Is the spam rate higher than the threshold? If yes, review the user-collection sources, check if the right expectations are being set, if the sending patterns are optimal, and if the content is relevant to the user.
Spam complaints (from the stats)	Is the spam rate higher than the threshold? If yes, review the user-collection sources, check if the right expectations are being set, if the sending patterns are optimal, and if the content is relevant to the user.
Domain and IP reputation (Gmail)	Is the domain reputation LOW/BAD? If yes, pause everything, investigate the root cause behind the drop, fix the underlying problem, reach out to Google Postmaster support, resume slowly, and ramp up.
SNDS status (Microsoft)	Is the filtered status RED? If yes, pause everything, investigate the root cause behind the drop, fix the underlying problem, reach out to Microsoft Postmaster support, resume slowly, and ramp up.
Inbox Placement	Is the overall placement lower than 95%? Is this low only for a specific domain? Review all other metrics (performance, reputation, complaints) and fix accordingly.
Blocklists	Are the IPs and domains in blocklists/blacklists? Blocks identified by reviewing soft Bounce reason. If yes, apply for removal.
Next Steps	Review the trends going back 6 months, find the gaps, and optimize. Follow best practices.