Why Email Deliverability Quietly Breaks Inside Publishing Organizations
- Jan 6
- 2 min read
Why Email Deliverability Quietly Breaks Inside Publishing Organizations
Why inbox problems usually aren’t caused by one big mistake—but the slow sum of many small ones.
Deliverability issues rarely blow up overnight. They erode slowly—send by send—because no one owns the whole picture.
In many organizations, no single team owns deliverability from end to end:
Editorial decides what gets sent.
Audience teams manage lists and segmentation.
Marketing executes campaigns.
Revenue influences volume and timing.
The inbox doesn’t care about internal structure. But it does respond to patterns.
Why It Breaks
Different teams optimize for different goals:
Editorial teams are rewarded for reach.
Revenue teams are rewarded for scale.
Audience teams are rewarded for growth and activation.
None of those goals are wrong. But the inbox is where they collide.
When performance dips, the reactions feel reasonable:
A campaign underperforms → it gets resent.
Audience counts dip → cold prospects are added.
Revenue needs a lift → another campaign is triggered.
Each action may make sense. But taken together, they form a pattern mailbox providers don’t trust.
How Roles Create Conflict
Inside the Org | What the Inbox Sees |
Resend for a good reason | Spammy behavior |
Add prospects to boost reach | List quality decline |
Increase frequency to drive revenue | Engagement softens |
Short-term lifts | Long-term erosion |
Mailbox providers don’t know you had a quarterly target.
They just know what they’re seeing:
Volume shifts. Frequency creep. A drop in engagement.
Subscribers feel it too. Emails start arriving more often than expected. A few complain. Some stop engaging. Most quietly ignore you.
From the inside, it looks like uneven performance.
From the inbox, it looks like a sender that can’t be trusted.
The Bottom Line
Deliverability doesn’t erode because someone did something wrong. It erodes because no one is accountable for the sum of all the reasonable decisions being made across the org.
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