If your outbound reply rate dropped by half in the last quarter and you can't work out why, the answer is almost certainly deliverability. Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo all tightened sender reputation rules in 2024 and again in early 2026 — and most sales teams' domain hygiene hasn't kept up.
The three-record baseline
SPF, DKIM and DMARC need to be set correctly on every sending domain. Not the parent brand domain — the sending domain. If you're sending from broachly.com you burn the brand domain's reputation; the fix is to send from a look-alike like getbroachly.com or hi-broachly.com and reserve broachly.com for the humans.
Warming windows
- Weeks 1–2: 20 messages per day per sender, all to opted-in or engaged addresses
- Weeks 3–4: 40 messages per day per sender, with reply-generating hooks
- Week 5 onwards: cap at 120 per day per sender — above this, deliverability degrades within 30 days
The signal to watch
The single best real-time deliverability signal is your reply rate on known-engaged accounts. If it drops week over week without a message change, your domain is being throttled.