The deliverability problem hiding in your transactional emails

4,000 new email leads land in your CRM every month.

And then your sender reputation starts tanking for reasons nobody can explain.

That was the situation at the Statue of Liberty & Ellis Island Foundation, which runs the Arrival Records Collection, a free online database where anyone can search millions of historical ship manifests and passenger records.

And a little bit of digging uncovered the deliverability problem.

The plumbing problem
The Foundation’s fundraising emails were sent from their CRM. Straightforward.

But their transactional emails, such as account confirmations and purchase receipts from the Arrival Records Collection, were being sent via Office 365.

Office 365 isn’t built to track email marketing data. Bounces and unsubscribes from those transactional sends were essentially disappearing.

The Foundation acquires 4,000 to 5,000 new leads per month from the records database alone, so the bad data was compounding fast.

For an organization described at the Bridge Conference as formerly “a pen and paper” operation in the middle of a multi-year digital transformation, this kind of infrastructure gap was easy to miss.

The deliverability fix
Working with agency partner MKDM, the Foundation tackled their deliverability turnaround in four stages.

They ran their full email file through Bouncer, an email validation service, to weed out undeliverable addresses.

They set up a subdomain for fundraising emails, which protected their main domain’s reputation and made it easier to isolate problems by email type.

They migrated transactional emails from Office 365 to Postmark, a legitimate platform built for transactional sending that actually tracks bounces and unsubscribes.
That data could then sync back to the CRM.

Then came the fundraising list warm-up in the CRM. Using lists of recent openers and subscribers, they started with small send volumes and gradually expanded, leaning on cultivation content to drive early engagement signals.

The results
Both their IP and domain reputation are back to high.

New standards are in place: a regular cultivation cadence between fundraising campaigns, targeting based on engagement recency and subscription dates, and email validation 2-4 times per year.

The team was candid that they’ll likely never return to the previous send volumes.
And that’s fine, considering they’re now reaching the people actually engaging with their emails.

How to check for this in your program
Know how your transactional emails are being sent and what they track. If you can’t see the data in your transactional emails, bad addresses and opt-outs from those sends go unnoticed.

Your mileage may vary based on whatever platform you’re using to accept donations or collect petition signatures, so dig into the fine print and understand what’s possible.

Check whether your fundraising and transactional emails share a domain. If they do, a deliverability hit on one side drags down the other.

Separating your email streams with subdomains is one of the most straightforward infrastructure moves you can make.

The bottom line
I’ve been there: This is one of those problems many teams never think to look for until it’s already costing you.

If your deliverability is sliding and the usual fixes aren’t working, your transactional email setup is worth a look.

Even better? Proactively reviewing your setup now.

Check our events list for more or reply to this email to submit one for consideration.

‘Til next time!
Sara