Understanding Email Deliverability Scores

Your email deliverability score is a composite signal that inbox providers — Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail — use to decide where your emails land. It is not a single number displayed in one place. It is a reputation your sending domain builds over time, based on everything your contacts do and do not do with your emails.

The deliverability infrastructure in MONDAi operates on GoHighLevel's SMTP and domain authentication layer. Your reputation is portable — it follows your sending domain, not the platform.

What Deliverability Score Measures

• Engagement rates — how many people open and click
• Complaint rates — how many people mark as spam
• Bounce rates — how many addresses are invalid
• Authentication — are SPF, DKIM, and DMARC set up correctly
• Sending volume patterns — are you growing gradually or sending massive spikes

The Factors That Affect It Most

Authentication (highest impact): Without SPF, DKIM, and DMARC in place, your emails cannot be verified as legitimate. This is the floor everything else builds on.

Engagement (ongoing): Consistently high open rates tell inbox providers your emails are wanted. Consistently low open rates signal the opposite.

Spam complaints (critical): Even a 0.1% complaint rate on a send is considered elevated. Gmail triggers re-evaluation at 0.1%.

Bounce rates: Hard bounces above 3% on a send indicate a dirty list problem that needs immediate attention.

How to Improve Your Deliverability

1. Complete full email authentication setup
2. Warm up new sending domains
3. Clean inactive contacts from your list quarterly
4. Use double opt-in for new form sign-ups
5. Send consistently — irregular, volume-spiking sends look suspicious
6. Never send to purchased or scraped lists

Common Mistakes

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Next Steps

• Treating deliverability as a one-time setup task rather than an ongoing practice.
• Waiting for open rates to drop before addressing list hygiene.
• Sending volume spikes — jumping from 200 emails a day to 10,000 overnight destroys reputation.
• Ignoring spam complaint data — even a handful of complaints on a small list is meaningful.