LOTT Agency

LOTT Agency runs its own cold-email program in-house and asked me to audit it. Replies weren't where they wanted them, and the working theory was that something in the sending setup had quietly gone wrong.

That theory is the default one, and it's usually pointed at the wrong layer. A cold domain, a bad DNS record, or a blocklisted inbox is an easy villain because it's technical and fixable. It's rarely where the actual damage is happening.

Audit the stack from the bottom up: infrastructure first, then campaign settings, then the copy itself, and only touch what's actually broken. Leave LOTT's voice and offer alone; fix the mechanics underneath it.

I started at the bottom of the stack, because that's where the client's worry was pointed and because it's genuinely where an audit like this should start anyway. LOTT's account had a handful of sending domains and just over a dozen inboxes, so I went through each one: SPF, DKIM, DMARC, warmup health, blocklist status, the whole checklist.

All of it came back healthy. Authentication was set up properly across every domain, warmup was landing almost entirely in the inbox, and nothing was sitting on a blocklist. I did flag one detail: two of the domains were actually sending through Microsoft, but the sending platform had them internally labeled as Google. Under a strict DMARC policy, that kind of mismatch can in theory cause hard bounces if it ever affects routing. Instead of trusting the label, I checked how the mail was actually landing, and the real route was aligned. The mislabeling was cosmetic, not a live risk, so it went on the list as a cleanup item rather than an emergency.

With infra ruled out, I moved up to campaign settings and then the copy itself, which is where most of the real problems were sitting. The same link showed up twice in one email, a repeated identical link is a spam signal on its own. There were inline images and emoji dragging on inbox placement, a signature written out by hand inside the body instead of centralized, and a "forward this to the right person" line repeated in every email instead of used once. Social proof was stacked into every CTA rather than living in one place, there was no opt-out language anywhere in the sequence, and the follow-up was going out as a brand-new email instead of a threaded reply, which reads worse to spam filters than a reply in the same thread.

I fixed everything mechanical and left LOTT's actual voice and offer untouched: consolidated the duplicate links, pulled the inline images, centralized the signature, moved the forward-nudge to the first email only, threaded the follow-up properly, and added a soft opt-out line. A few things I flagged instead of changing outright, like money-forward language stacked into subject lines, since that's a voice and offer call that belongs to LOTT, not a deliverability fix I should be making unilaterally.

Where it landed: the mechanical fixes went straight in, the flagged items went back to LOTT as a decision list, and the audit did the thing an audit is supposed to do, it told them where to actually spend their attention instead of where they assumed they needed to.