Your best subscribers might not be receiving your emails

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

― George Bernard Shaw (Irish playwright)

Here's a scenario that should unsettle you.

Your best members and donors — the ones who've opened your emails for years, clicked through, and support you repeatedly — are no longer receiving your messages.

Not because they unsubscribed. Not because they complained. They just… stopped arriving.

Arghhh!

Gmail quietly decided you weren't trustworthy enough, and your newsletter now sits in a spam folder that nobody checks.

You wouldn't know. Your ESP still shows the send as delivered. Your open rate has dipped a little, but open rates always fluctuate, right?

This is happening to more charity email programmes than one might think. And now might actually be a good moment to check — before you're deep in a campaign and discover the damage.

Here are five things worth looking at now.

1. Your sender reputation score

Most marketers have never looked at this, and it’s as much an art as it is a science. But you can get a good idea by checking a few tools.

Google Postmaster Tools is a free tool for people who send email at scale. It takes ten minutes to set up, and will show you exactly how Gmail classifies your sending domain — i.e. whether your emails are landing in Gmail’s junk folder.

Google classifies your domain from High to Low reputation, with a spam rate indicator alongside it.

If you're sending from a custom domain (you should be — never send from a personal Gmail address!), go set this up today. A Low or Medium rating means a significant portion of your emails are already being filtered.

The benchmark to know: Google starts filtering aggressively at spam complaint rates above 0.1%. That's one complaint per 1,000 emails. Easier to hit than you'd think if you're mailing to old, unengaged lists.

2. List age and engagement decay

When did you last remove someone from your list?

And when did you last check if anyone has dropped off?

Do you know if there’s anyone who hasn't opened an email in 12 months?

Most charity email lists are carrying a significant amount of dead weight — contacts who joined years ago for a specific campaign, have never engaged since, and whose inbox providers have noticed. Sending to unengaged addresses consistently signals to Gmail and others that your messages aren't wanted.

A practical rule of thumb: anyone who hasn't opened in 12 months should go through a re-engagement campaign, and if that doesn't work, be suppressed. It feels counterintuitive to make your list smaller — we all like the numbers to get bigger.

But a smaller, engaged list will ultimately reach and impact more people than a large, stale one.

3. Your consent records

GDPR turned ten this year. Happy birthday to everyone’s favourite four letter privacy law.

A lot of charity email lists still contain contacts whose consent was recorded on a spreadsheet in 2017, or who ticked a box that said something legally vague like "keep me updated."

Beyond the compliance risk, this is a deliverability issue too. Contacts who don't remember signing up are more likely to hit the spam button or simply never open — both of which damage your reputation.

It's worth doing a cohort review. This may sound sophisticated, but it’s not that hard to actually do.

Segment your list by signup date, and source if you can. Look at engagement rates by cohort. For example, if everyone who joined before 2020 has an open rate below 5%, that cohort might be hurting you more than it’s helping.

4. Your suppression list hygiene

This one is easy to overlook. Unsubscribes, hard bounces, and spam complaints should all be flowing into your suppression list automatically — but gaps creep in, especially in organisations that have switched ESPs, run events and campaigns using separate tools, or collect contacts across multiple systems.

A simple check: take your last 50 unsubscribes and manually verify they're suppressed across every system you use to send email. You'd be surprised how often they're not.

Another way to think about this: imagine you unsubscribed from an organisation’s latest email campaign. And then they email you next week… You’d probably be frustrated!

It doesn’t matter to the contact that you’ve got a messy, chaotic setup across 6 different tools — all that matters is that you stop sending them email.

5. Your authentication setup

SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are quite scary sounding, but they are the technical foundations of email trust. Without them, inbox providers have no reliable way to verify that your emails are actually coming from you — and will treat them with suspicion accordingly.

If you don't know whether these are set up correctly, ask whoever manages your DNS records. If you don’t know who that is… go ask the most technical person on your team — likely the person who originally set up your website.

There are also free tools like MXToolbox that can check your setup for you in seconds. The thing to look for with DMARC specifically: a policy of p=none means it's set up but not actually doing anything protective. You want p=quarantine or p=reject to get the full benefit.

The uncomfortable truth

Email isn't free. Every message you send costs energy, lands in someone's inbox (or doesn't), and either builds or erodes the relationship you have with your supporters.

The organisations that treat email carefully — that keep their lists clean, their consent records honest, and their sending reputation healthy — consistently outperform those that don't.

None of this is glamorous work. But spending a few hours on it now is worth considerably more than discovering a deliverability problem mid-campaign.

If you want a hand running through any of this, we're happy to take a look and chat. Just get in touch with us.

James

P.S. One more handy thing to share this week — our good friends at Wholegrain Digital (pioneers in digital sustainability) just released their new Digital Declutter checklist. You’ll find that most of the recommendations for improving list health also make for sustainability improvements too. Everyone wins!