Designmodo MailSoar partnership
Email deliverability consultants who get you back in the inbox
A gorgeous email that lands in spam is a gorgeous email nobody reads. We build the design tools. For the delivery side, we partner with MailSoar, an independent team that works on deliverability and nothing else: audits, authentication, warm-up, and sender reputation recovery.
No commitment. You describe the problem, they tell you what it would take to fix it.
- E-commerce
- SaaS
- Fintech
- Publishing
- Marketplaces
- Coaching
Satisfaction and client figures reported by MailSoar. Inbox placement above 95% is the target set for each engagement.
When it's time to call in a specialist.
Some deliverability problems are a five-minute DNS fix. Others quietly burn revenue for months. These are the signals that hands-on help pays for itself.
Emails land in spam or Promotions
Subscribers say they never got your message, then find it in junk. Placement testing shows where mail actually goes per provider, which is the first thing a consultant measures.
Open rates fell off a cliff
A sudden drop, especially at one provider like Gmail, usually means a reputation or authentication problem rather than a boring subject line.
You're on a blocklist
Spamhaus, SORBS, or a provider-level block. Delisting requests get denied or the listing keeps coming back because the underlying cause was never fixed.
Gmail and Yahoo compliance errors
Bounces citing authentication, DMARC failures in your reports, or complaint rates creeping past 0.3%. The 2024 bulk sender rules turned these from suggestions into hard requirements.
You're migrating ESPs or IPs
Moving to a new sending platform, a dedicated IP, or a new domain without a warm-up plan is the classic self-inflicted reputation wound.
You changed sending setup
A new domain, a platform migration, or an IP switch resets your reputation. Without proper warm-up and authentication, inbox placement drops the day you flip the switch.
What does an email deliverability consultant do?
An email deliverability consultant diagnoses why your messages land in spam, get filtered, or bounce, then fixes the root causes so mail reaches the inbox. The work spans DNS and authentication records (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), sending infrastructure, list hygiene, content patterns, volume pacing, and your reputation with mailbox providers like Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo.
Think of it like a doctor. First they run the tests, checking where your mail actually lands across providers, since ESP dashboards only show whether a server accepted the message, not whether anyone can see it. Then they read the vitals (Google Postmaster Tools, blocklist status, complaint rates), find the cause behind the symptoms, and put a recovery plan in place. And like a good doctor, they keep following the patient afterward, monitoring reputation so the next problem gets caught early instead of after a quarter of dead campaigns.
You will also see the same work sold as an email deliverability service, an email deliverability agency engagement, or an email deliverability audit. Same discipline, different packaging: a consultant advises, an agency does it for you, and an audit is the diagnostic that usually starts either one.
What email deliverability consulting covers.
Every engagement is scoped to the actual problem, but the work falls into six buckets.
Deliverability audit
A full review of your DNS records, sending history, list practices, content, and inbox placement across major providers, ending in a prioritized fix list rather than a vague scorecard.
Authentication setup
Correct, aligned SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, moved safely from monitoring to enforcement. BIMI on top if you want your logo showing next to messages in supported inboxes.
Infrastructure and warm-up
Sending domain architecture, dedicated versus shared IPs, subdomain separation for marketing and transactional streams, and gradual warm-up schedules that build trust instead of tripping filters.
Sender reputation recovery
Blocklist removal, complaint reduction, re-engagement segmentation, and a controlled ramp back to full volume after a reputation hit. Slow by nature, faster with someone who has done it hundreds of times.
Monitoring and alerting
Placement tests, reputation dashboards, and DMARC report analysis running continuously, so a bad campaign or a spoofing attempt surfaces the same day instead of next quarter.
Ongoing support and coaching
A dedicated expert working alongside your team on campaign reviews, pre-send checks, and the judgment calls that no checklist covers. Your team learns the discipline as you go.
Results clients put their name on.
Reviews tell you the work is pleasant. These tell you what it moved, for brands you already know.
Ogee
The skincare brand tripled its email open rates after its deliverability was rebuilt.
True Classic
The apparel brand moved its domain reputation from low to high in about four weeks.
Stanford AI Labs
Their mail went from the Microsoft spam folder back to the primary inbox.
Figures as published in MailSoar's case studies.
From first call to healthy inbox placement.
Free consultation
You walk through the symptoms with a deliverability expert. They tell you what is likely wrong, what fixing it involves, and what it would cost. No obligation either way.
Audit and diagnosis
Placement testing across providers, DNS and authentication review, reputation analysis, and list evaluation. You get a report with findings ranked by impact.
Fixes and implementation
Records corrected, infrastructure rebuilt where needed, warm-up plans executed, delisting handled. Urgent incidents get a fast, focused recovery plan, prioritized so the most damaging problems are fixed first.
Monitor and maintain
Regular check-ins, reputation tracking, and reporting so gains hold. Many clients keep an ongoing retainer; others take the fixes and run solo.
Why we recommend MailSoar.
Plenty of marketing agencies list deliverability as one bullet among twenty. MailSoar is the opposite: an independent shop, founded in France and working globally, that does deliverability and nothing else. That focus is exactly what you want when your revenue channel is stuck in a junk folder.
- Pure specialization. Deliverability is the whole business, not a side service bolted onto campaign management.
- Track record at scale. More than 500 businesses supported, across e-commerce, SaaS, publishing, fintech, and harder-to-send industries most agencies turn away.
- Results clients confirm. They report that 98% of their clients see measurable deliverability improvement.
- A named expert, not a ticket queue. You get a dedicated contact who explains the why behind every change, with regular check-ins and shared reporting.
- At home in your stack. HubSpot, Klaviyo, Salesforce, Mailchimp, and the other major sending platforms are daily terrain, and support comes in English and French.
- Recognized by clients. Ranked among Trustfolio's top sales and marketing leaders in 2025, based on verified client feedback.
Design gets your email opened. Deliverability decides whether it ever gets seen. We spent years helping people build beautiful emails in Postcards, and the most painful support conversations were never about design. They were about mail vanishing into spam. That is a specialist's problem, so we found the specialists.
Meet the full MailSoar team.
Consulting is only as good as the consultants. The deliverability experts below run the audits, rebuild the infrastructure, and handle the delisting calls, while customer success, billing, marketing, and engineering keep every engagement running. These are the names you will see on your reports.
Pierre Pignault
CEO & Founder
Pierre Galiegue
Deliverability Manager
Virginie Pizot-Raynaud
Customer Success Manager
Lucile Merra
Marketing & Partnership Manager
Charlie Noguer
Billing Manager
Julien Lamouroux
Deliverability Expert
Mathieu Girol
Deliverability Expert
Elena Penas Alamo
Deliverability Expert
Vikas Dhulipudi
Deliverability Expert
Yevheniia Liashenko
Deliverability Expert
Baudry Luzayadio
Deliverability Expert
Filipe
Software DeveloperWhat verified clients say.
MailSoar holds a 4.9/5 across 195 authenticated reviews on Trustfolio, which named it the top B2B company in Marketing and Sales for 2025. Sixteen favorites below, trimmed for length.
“These guys are the absolute experts in what is going on in the industry and know how to get deliverability issues resolved instantly.”
“We went from a very poor domain reputation to solid inbox delivery, very happy with the collaboration.”
“Our email deliverability was significantly improved, ending up in peoples inbox 90%+ of the time.”
“Mailsoar helped us achieve 40%+ open rates and high click through rates with our campaigns…”
“Resolved my issue within 7 minutes. Polite, friendly, trustworthy.”
“After a three month project with MailSoar, at the end, all of our objectives were met along with a roadmap for the future.”
“My emails are now getting a 50% + open rate. I learned so much working with them…”
“They are extremely easy to work with, knowledgeable, and genuinely interested in getting you results.”
“We were facing issues with email deliverability and Pierre and his team were able to help solve them!”
“Our deliverability has been fantastic ever since. We've been able to generate a lot of revenue that we were missing out on previously…”
“MailSoar quickly brought our domain reputation from Bad to High and set us up with a solid foundation and a set of best practices…”
“Our account representative, Vikas, was fantastic… always willing to go the extra mile to help us succeed.”
“The audit was extremely thorough, and recommended next steps well communicated with a clear perspective on prioritization.”
“Our email deliverability metrics have drastically improved since starting with Mailsoar.”
“They helped us grow our open rate from ~10% to almost 50% for our eCommerce store…”
“He was knowledgeable, kind and professional. It was a pleasure working with him.”
Consultant, tool, or in-house hire?
All three have a place. The honest comparison looks like this.
| Option | Deliverability consultant / agency | Self-serve tools | In-house specialist |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | Active problems, migrations, compliance deadlines, reputation recovery, anything where a wrong move makes things worse | Ongoing monitoring, placement testing, warm-up automation once fundamentals are healthy | Very large senders (millions of emails per month) where deliverability is a daily, full-time concern |
| Typical cost | Audits roughly $1,500 to $5,000; retainers from about $1,000 to $10,000+ per month; most quote per scope | Around $50 to $150+ per month | $90,000 to $150,000+ per year in salary alone |
| Speed to impact | Fast. Diagnosis in days; urgent incidents sometimes in hours | Instant data, but you interpret and act on it yourself | Slow to hire, strong once ramped |
| Depth | Deep. Pattern recognition from hundreds of prior cases | Shallow. Tools flag symptoms, not causes | Deep on your stack, narrower exposure to other senders' failures |
Many teams pair a consultant for the fix with lightweight tools for the long-term watch. That combination costs a fraction of a hire and covers both jobs.
The rules changed. Mailbox providers now enforce them.
Since February 2024, Gmail and Yahoo require bulk senders (5,000+ messages per day) to authenticate with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, offer one-click unsubscribe honored within two days, and keep spam complaint rates below 0.3%, with under 0.1% as the safe target. Microsoft rolled out comparable requirements for high-volume senders to Outlook and Hotmail in 2025.
These are not best practices anymore. Miss them and your mail gets filtered or rejected outright, regardless of how good the content is. A consultant's first job on most new engagements is simply bringing senders into compliance.
8 deliverability fixes you can make this week.
Try these first. If placement is still poor afterward, the problem is deeper than DIY, and that is precisely when a consultant earns their fee.
- Authenticate everything. Publish SPF and DKIM for every service that sends as your domain, then add a DMARC record. Start at
p=noneto collect reports before enforcing. - Align your From domain. The visible From address should match the domain that passes SPF or DKIM. Misalignment quietly fails DMARC even when both records exist.
- Separate your mail streams. Marketing on one subdomain, transactional on another. A bad campaign should never take your password resets down with it.
- Clean the list. Remove addresses with no opens or clicks in roughly six months, drop role addresses, and never send to a purchased list. Engagement is the reputation currency providers actually count.
- Add one-click unsubscribe. The List-Unsubscribe header with one-click support is required for bulk senders, and it converts silent spam complaints into harmless opt-outs.
- Warm up anything new. New domain or IP? Start with small volumes to your most engaged contacts and ramp gradually over four to eight weeks.
- Watch Google Postmaster Tools. Free, and it shows your domain reputation, spam rate, and authentication results at the provider that matters most for most lists.
- Test placement before big sends. Seed tests across Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo show where a campaign will land while you can still fix it.
Email deliverability consulting, answered.
What does an email deliverability consultant do?
They diagnose why messages land in spam or get blocked, then fix the causes. Typical work includes auditing DNS and authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), reviewing sending infrastructure and volume patterns, cleaning up list hygiene practices, repairing sender reputation with mailbox providers, and setting up monitoring so problems get caught early.
What happens in a deliverability audit?
It opens with a workshop on your goals, then the team collects and analyzes your deliverability data, reviews your DNS records, and runs delivery tests to see where mail actually lands. You get a written audit with findings and conclusions, and once you approve the recommendations, they handle the implementation.
How much does an email deliverability consultant cost?
One-time audits commonly run from about $1,500 to $5,000. Managed retainers range from roughly $1,000 to $10,000+ per month depending on sending volume and complexity. Self-serve monitoring tools start around $50 to $150 per month. Most specialized agencies scope custom quotes after a free consultation.
How long does it take to fix email deliverability?
It depends on the cause. Authentication fixes often take one to two weeks. Warming up a new domain or IP typically takes four to eight weeks. Full sender reputation recovery after blocklistings or a long decline can take three to six months of consistent, monitored sending.
What is a good email deliverability rate?
Aim for 95% or higher inbox placement. Note the difference between delivery rate (the receiving server accepted the message) and inbox placement (it actually reached the inbox instead of spam). A 99% delivery rate can hide a serious spam folder problem, which is why consultants measure placement, not just acceptance.
Why are my emails going to spam even though I follow best practices?
Common hidden causes: a shared IP with a bad neighbor, DMARC alignment failures, sudden volume spikes, stale or purchased contacts dragging engagement down, spam trap hits, and content patterns providers associate with abuse. A consultant tests placement across providers and reads reputation signals like Google Postmaster Tools to find the real cause.
Do I need SPF, DKIM and DMARC?
Yes. Gmail and Yahoo require SPF and DKIM for all senders, and DMARC for bulk senders (5,000+ messages per day). Microsoft applies similar rules to high-volume senders reaching Outlook and Hotmail addresses. Without all three configured and aligned, a growing share of your mail gets filtered or rejected outright.
What are the Gmail and Yahoo bulk sender requirements?
Since February 2024, senders of 5,000+ daily messages to Gmail or Yahoo must authenticate with SPF, DKIM and DMARC, offer one-click unsubscribe honored within two days, and keep spam complaint rates below 0.3% (ideally under 0.1%). Microsoft introduced comparable requirements for high-volume senders to Outlook in 2025.
What is the difference between email delivery and email deliverability?
Delivery means the receiving mail server accepted your message. Deliverability means it reached the inbox rather than the spam folder or a filtered tab. Most ESP dashboards report delivery, which is why senders with "99% delivered" can still have half their mail rotting in spam.
Why did Designmodo partner with MailSoar?
We build email design tools, and beautiful emails only matter if they reach the inbox. MailSoar works exclusively on deliverability, supports 500+ businesses worldwide, and reports that 98% of clients confirm measurable improvement. When our users need hands-on deliverability help, this is the team we recommend.
Your emails are too good for the spam folder.
Get a free discovery call with the deliverability team. Describe the problem, get an honest read on the fix, and decide from there.
Book your free discovery call →Independent deliverability specialists. 500+ businesses supported worldwide.