How many of your cold emails actually land?

Most teams measure cold email on reply rate. The number that decides everything happens earlier: did the email reach the inbox at all. You can write the best message in your market and still talk to no one if the mailbox provider files you under spam.

What decides deliverability

Three things matter more than your copy.

Authentication. SPF, DKIM and DMARC tell the receiving server you are who you claim to be. Miss one and you look like a spoof. This is the first thing we check on any domain.

Domain and IP reputation. New domains have no history, so they get watched. Send too much too fast and you burn the reputation before you have one. Warmup builds it slowly, the way a real person ramps up.

Engagement signals. Opens, replies and “not spam” marks lift you. Bounces, deletes and spam complaints sink you. The list you send to is part of your deliverability, not separate from it.

Why volume makes it worse

Scaling a broken setup scales the damage. If one in two emails lands in spam at low volume, pushing more through the same domains does not fix the ratio, it just trains the filters faster. Fix the foundation first, then turn up the volume.

The quick test

Before any campaign we run a seed test across the major providers and read back exactly where mail lands. It turns a guess into a number you can act on. If you want that number for your own domain, the deliverability audit takes a few minutes to request.