Imagine sending out invitations to a party—you’ve created the perfect design, added the event details, and double-checked the guest list. But half of the invites never even make it to your friends?
That’s exactly what happens when emails don’t land in the inbox. This is probably why you’re looking for help from an email deliverability expert—or to become one yourself—all to ensure your messages don’t get lost or ignored.
TL;DR: An email deliverability expert ensures emails avoid spam folders and reach the right audience. Key skills include DNS configuration, content testing, sender reputation tracking, and cross-functional alignment. Experts monitor metrics like bounce rate, spam complaints, and inbox placement to adjust strategies. Strong collaboration across sales, marketing, and IT ensures list quality and message relevance. Essential tools include content testing, domain reputation tracking, and inbox placement platforms. Allegrow supports experts with contact-level Safety Net scans, real-time content tests, and detailed inbox visibility across sales platforms. Teams using Allegrow report up to 94% sender reputation and a 2–3x increase in reply rates.
What is an email deliverability expert or specialist?
In short, an email deliverability expert is someone who synergizes the use of the necessary technologies and sender best practices to ensure that emails land where they’re supposed to—the user’s primary inbox.
These specialists understand the somewhat technical and strategic factors influencing deliverability, from authentication protocols and email content optimization to domain reputation management and spam trap removal—bad contacts that can harm your outreach efforts. They are the heroes who ensure that contact lists are up-to-date, with users who are ready to engage, and that important emails have the highest chance of being seen and acted upon.
The good news? The tools and techniques to achieve great email deliverability are available and ready for you to implement.
What skills set great email deliverability specialists apart?
The role of an email deliverability expert requires a combination of technical expertise, analytical skills, and strategic insight. Here are some essential qualities, traits, and tools the best in the field should possess:
1. Technical proficiency and platform know-how
An expert must have a good understanding of email authentication protocols, DNS settings, and the infrastructure of email delivery. They should know how (or know someone who can help) to correctly set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records and understand the nuances of warm-up and domain reputation.
2. Dedication to ongoing content testing
A key part of the role is ensuring that the email content itself is optimized for deliverability. This involves testing subject lines, body text, and calls-to-action to avoid spam triggers and maximize engagement. Great experts know how to use content testing tools to craft emails that perform and don’t flag spam filters.
3. Proactive troubleshooting and risk prevention
A good email deliverability expert is always one step ahead. They’ll actively monitor core deliverability metrics like sender reputation and response rates, as well as identify potential issues before they escalate–adapting their strategies to align with changing email service provider (ESP) algorithms and sender guidelines.
4. Commitment to list hygiene and data quality
Email list hygiene is critical to maintaining deliverability, and experts go beyond just validating emails. Instead, they carry out risk analysis on contact lists, identifying and removing spam reporters or risky addresses that can harm sender reputation (we’ll cover sender reputation further on).
5. Collaboration across sales, marketing, and IT
Deliverability is not just the responsibility of one person or team. The best experts work from within, or alongside Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, and IT departments to ensure that everyone understands their role in maintaining high deliverability standards, from clean data practices to creating and testing engaging email content.
Example 1: Sales teams must make sure they’ve run a thorough risk analysis of contact lists to ensure prospects that could negatively impact deliverability (spam reporters, bounces, blacklisted contacts, etc) are not being targeted in cadences.
Example 2: Marketing should regularly assess their subscriber lists (whether the emails come from website form fills or other inbound sources, or not) with the same diligence to ensure their newsletters and campaigns do not reach unengaged users. This should be done using a contact risk-analysis tool, as well as double opt-in or sunsetting engagement strategies.
6. Deep understanding of deliverability metrics
We’ve touched on a few of the metrics above, but just to reiterate, these are the metrics that have the greatest impact on email deliverability and why:
- Bounce Rate: High bounce rates can harm your sender reputation, so it's essential to monitor both hard bounces (e.g., receiving a recipient address rejected error message, which can be caused by misconfigured setup on your domain) and soft bounces (e.g., the recipient's server being full).
- Spam Complaint Rate: An increase in spam complaints indicates potential problems with your content or sending practices (e.g., your contact lists contain users that are frequent spam reporters, or they are not the right audience segment to receive your messages).
- Response and Click-Through Rates: These engagement metrics influence how ESPs perceive your emails and can impact your email delivery in the long run.
These are also a good indicator of whether your content is reaching the right audience, and can allow you to move on to targeting new lists of contacts quicker, than spending too much time targeting prospects that are not a good fit.
- Inbox Placement Rate: This metric reflects the percentage of your emails that successfully land in recipients' primary inboxes (as opposed to spam or promotions folder), offering key insights into your overall deliverability performance.
- Sender Reputation: A measure of how trustworthy your domain appears to email providers, based on some of the above factors like engagement rates, bounce rates, and spam complaints. A strong sender reputation is crucial for ensuring your emails reach the inbox.
To help you stay on top of these metrics, you will need to have the right tool stack, which brings us to our next point.
7. Mastery of the best deliverability tools
Email deliverability experts rely on a range of tools to diagnose, monitor, and optimize performance. These can include:
- Google Postmaster Tools: These tools allow you to monitor metrics like domain reputation.
- Content testing tools: These will allow you to test different versions of your email messages in order to see which variants will perform better ahead of sending emails, i.e. which messaging will generate lower spam rate complaints with a better overall reputation score
- Email risk analysis: Although there are many tools that allow you to verify or validate email addresses, a risk analysis tool will allow you to take a deeper dive into the quality of your contacts or subscriber lists–giving you visibility on which contacts are likely to bounce, report you as spam, or will outright not engage with your emails.
- Domain and mailbox reputation monitoring: While tools like Postmaster can give you insight into your overall domain reputation when sending emails from multiple mailboxes attached to the same domain or subdomain, you need visibility on each account to see which mailbox activity could be impacting your overall performance.
- Inbox Placement Platforms: These tools compile the above features and functionalities to provide detailed insights into where your emails are landing, across multiple teams and user types. They can show you which factors are impacting deliverability, as well as integration with other sending tools you work with, like Sales Engagement Platforms.
Let’s dive into a little further how an Inbox Placement Platform can help you become a deliverability pro.
Allegrow Inbox Placement Platform
Allegrow’s Inbox Placement platform is designed to empower anyone to become an email deliverability expert. Here are some of the highlight features as well as a brief overview of what the platform offers:
Content Testing
Using Allegrow’s content A/B testing tools, you can ensure your subject lines, body text, and CTAs align with best practices, and avoid flagging spam triggers ahead of sending your emails.
Safety Net Feature
You can carry out robust risk analysis on your contact lists with Allegrow’s Safety Net. This feature monitors your campaigns in real time, alerting you to potential issues before they impact your deliverability. You can integrate the Safety Net with your existing sending platforms, as well as upload lists of contacts as and when you need them.
Inbox Placement Analysis
Allegrow offers detailed visibility into where your emails are landing—whether it’s the inbox, spam, or promotions tab, and it uses real B2B inbox placement data to help strengthen your domain and sending strategies for maximum effectiveness.
Here's a quick glimpse at the Allegrow platform overview.
Meet Allegrow’s Email Deliverability Experts
At Allegrow, we’re proud to have a team of seasoned email deliverability specialists to help audit your current processes, help you set up integrations, as well as monitor and improve your deliverability performance. Today, Allegrow is used by market leaders to fuel an efficient sales process, including customers like Algolia, Apollo.io, Paddle, and Workvivo (by Zoom). Fundamentally ‘Allegrowers’ believe in quality over quanity of emails to produce results.
Ruari Baker – CEO & Co-founder
Ruari Baker, CEO and co-founder of Allegrow has been working on the science behind inbox placement (whether emails reach the primary inbox or the spam folder) since starting Allegrow in 2018. After analyzing the inbox placement of more than 100 million emails, Ruari has developed a unique expertise on the emerging issue of email deliverability.
Kieran Baker – CRO & Co-founder
Kieran leads Allegrow’s sales strategy and helps solve sales leader’s email outreach challenges. With a deep understanding of Sales needs, he bridges the gap between technical deliverability solutions and business success.
Radu Oprea – CTO & Co-founder
Radu leads the technical operations at Allegrow. As CTO, he combines his expertise in software development and email infrastructure to develop solutions that empower users to overcome deliverability challenges and scale their outreach with confidence.
James Paul Pirie – Customer Success Manager
James is the go-to expert for Allegrow’s customers. With a knack for simplifying complex deliverability challenges, he’s helped hundreds of clients optimize their email campaigns for better results.
The team boasts years of experience helping clients of all sizes, across many industries, and has provided materials, group training sessions, and webinars detailed below.
Top deliverability resources for specialists and teams
Becoming an email deliverability expert involves staying ahead of trends, learning from the best, and leveraging the right resources. Here’s is some useful content to help you get started:
1. Email Deliverability Report 2025: Industry Insights
Allegrow’s comprehensive report features actionable insights from leading experts to help you master deliverability and inbox placement in 2025.
If you'd like to be the first to receive our cutting edge email deliverability reports you can do this by regisering here.
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Learn from Industry Experts
Our report includes contributions from renowned experts:
- Dennis Dayman: Renowned for his expertise in privacy and compliance.
- Jesse Hernandez: A strategist specializing in high-volume email campaigns.
- Pablo Gallego: Focused on global deliverability challenges.
- Bobby Jimenez: A spam filter and deliverability expert with 30+ years of experience
- Anne Tomlin: An HTML email developer pro (offers great insights for email marketers).
- Alec Beglarian: Known for his work on sender reputation optimization.
2. Allegrow Inbox Insights Webinar Series
Gain real-world strategies from industry leaders with our webinar series, designed to empower both beginners and seasoned professionals.
In the series so far we have covered:
- How to boost sender reputation and reduce spam rates (October 2024)
- Cold emails that land (November 2024)
- Mastering email deliverability in 2025 (December 2024)
If you’d like us to keep you posted on upcoming webinars, you can register your interest here.
Below are some examples of teams that have embraced email deliverability best practices and have seen improved ROI on their email outreach
Email Deliverability Results: Real-world case studies
Booster
“It’s been great to use both the performance hub and the leaderboard. Being able to go in, see all the individual users, see their historic tendencies, and assess the impact of their activities in a live environment can impact sender reputation. We also started using the Safety Net everywhere to scan all of our contacts quarterly to keep our lists up to date, and it has been really beneficial.”
– Mark Norman, Vice President of Sales
“When we look overall, at just our reply rates, our click rates, our open rates – they've all improved looking at the quarters we've worked with Allegrow this year, compared to last year. For example, our response rate improved by 80%.”
– Lindsay Minnema, Sales Enablement Specialist
SpringLabs
"We needed a solution that integrated directly with our current tech stack and after browsing the Outreach marketplace we saw Allegrow. Although there are plenty of other tools that ‘warm’ emails, there wasn’t any solution like Allegrow that was also able to prevent you from falling into known spam traps, known spam reporters, and intervene to stop this harmful activity before the email gets sent.
One problem we saw Allegrow could solve with the Safety Net was creating quality assurance around how fresh our email contact data is. For example, there’s data that could have come into our CRM and been fresh at the time, but if reps are re-prospecting old accounts or working through past segments, this could easily turn into emails that bounce and hurt your sender reputation.”
– Alan Talavera, Director of Business Development
Workvivo
“If you do outbound sales or campaigns in general – either personalized or automated, you need a product monitoring your email sender reputation score. With all the ISPs cracking down on what emails get inbox placement or go to spam, a tool like Allegrow is the next big thing in the sales tech stack.
With Outreach campaigns, we’ve seen our reply rates increase by 200-300% using Allegrow to optimize inbox placement. Over the same period of this improvement, we’ve also seen Allegrow has taken our sender reputation score from between 50-70% to currently 94%.”
– Richard Mullins, Head of Global Business Development
If you’d like to talk to one of Allegrow’s Email Deliverability Experts, contact support@allegrow.co or book your free audit call here.
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