Email Warm-up & Migration (Operator Guide)
This is the operator's how-to. For the why and which mode am I in, start with Email Deliverability, the Whole Process.
Switching a golf club from Intelligent Golf to Capture is a reputation-transfer project, not a platform switch. The members' relationship with the club is warm. The new sending subdomain's relationship with Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, and Apple Mail is not. This section documents the end-to-end process Albatross uses to migrate that reputation safely, protect inbox placement, and stay on the right side of UK GDPR and PECR.
What this section is
A complete internal SOP for agency operators and account managers running a club's email migration. It covers compliance audits, DNS authentication, list hygiene, the warm-up ramp, monitoring thresholds, SMS policy, seed-inbox diagnostics, and per-club runbooks. The club is the data controller; Albatross and Capture are the processor. Every instruction in this section is written with that distinction in mind.
The "Prime, then Prove" model
Every migration follows a single strategic sequence. Step 0, before GHL sends a single email, the club uses its existing Intelligent Golf infrastructure to announce the new sender name and the new sending address to members. This rides IG's already-trusted reputation to prime members, which is the highest-leverage action available. Only after that announcement does GHL begin sending, starting with the most engaged members only, with full authentication in place, and scaling volume in response to measured metrics rather than a fixed calendar.
The four gates that must be cleared, in order:
- Prime, Step 0 transition announcement sent from Intelligent Golf whilst access is still live at cutover.
- Authenticate, SPF, DKIM (2048-bit), DMARC (
p=none→p=quarantine/reject), custom tracking CNAME (link.<club>.co.uk), PTR/reverse DNS, TLS, RFC 8058 one-click unsubscribe, Google Postmaster enrolled on both root and subdomain. - Suppress, chronically unengaged and likely-hard-bounce contacts removed from the mailable list before the first GHL send; suppressions imported first.
- Ramp, engagement-gated sends starting with Tier A (~10-20% of the active base), widening through Tiers B-C (Tier D only on the 60-day fallback; Tier E stays suppressed) in approximately 1.5× steps, gated on a spam complaint rate below 0.10% and hard bounce below 0.50% (read from Mailgun events, Postmaster is often blank at club volume). Default ramp is 7-14 days on GHL's pre-warmed shared IP pool. The 30/60-day calendar schedule is documented as a fallback for clubs with stale or patchy data.
When to use this process
Apply this SOP for every Intelligent Golf → GHL LC Email migration, regardless of list size. A club with 500 members has no volume buffer, a single spam complaint in a 500-person send is 0.20%. Two complaints is 0.40%, past the 0.30% threshold at which Google and Yahoo begin rejecting mail outright. The process is not cautious for caution's sake; it is calibrated to the mathematical reality of small lists.
The SOP is also the reference for any club migrating from another legacy golf-management platform (ClubSystems, BRS Golf, Club Systems Group) where the same conditions apply: new subdomain, zero reputation history, real members who expect recognisable communications.
The non-negotiables
If any of these four conditions is not met, do not advance to the next phase. They are gates, not guidelines.
| Non-negotiable | Why it is a gate |
|---|---|
| Authenticated subdomain before first send, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, custom tracking CNAME all passing | Google and Yahoo enforce these under their 2025-2026 bulk-sender mandates. Any failure triggers SMTP rejection, not just filtering. |
| Engaged members first, Tier A only for the first sends | Early complaint and bounce rates set the subdomain's reputation trajectory. Sending to unengaged contacts in Week 1 is the fastest path to permanent domain damage. |
| Shared IP pool, never dedicated, stay on GHL/Mailgun's managed shared infrastructure | A dedicated IP requires roughly 100,000+ sends per month to sustain reputation. Our clubs send approximately 4,000-8,000 per month at most. A dedicated IP at this volume cools between sends and causes more harm than good. |
| Judge success by complaints and bounces, not opens | Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) pre-fetches tracking pixels automatically, inflating measured opens by roughly 40-50%. Gmail retired its domain/IP reputation dashboard on 30 September 2025. Open rate is a supplementary signal at best; spam complaint rate and hard bounce rate are the operational scorecard. |
Metric thresholds (use exactly)
| Metric | Green | Review | Urgent | Hard stop |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gmail spam complaint rate | < 0.10% | 0.10-0.20% | > 0.20% | ≥ 0.30% |
| Hard bounce rate | < 0.50% | 0.50-2.0% | > 2.0% | > 3.0% |
| Unsubscribe rate | < 0.30% | 0.30-1.0% (content review) | > 1.0% (review content) | , |
| Authentication pass rate | ~100% | Any unexplained drop → pause and diagnose | , | , |
During the ramp, read these gates from Mailgun events (FBL complaints, bounces, deferrals), at club volume Google Postmaster usually shows no data at all, and a blank dashboard is normal, not a green light. Postmaster becomes a useful cross-check once full-list volume flows. GHL's in-platform view on custom SMTP shows only opens and clicks, it does not surface delivery failures, deferrals, or bounce classification. Always diagnose delivery health at the infrastructure layer, not inside GHL's dashboard. Full source hierarchy: Monitoring.
How this section is organised
| Page | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Operator Runbook | Step-by-step GHL configuration: Drip Mode setup, smart list creation, GHL warm-up cap, and the pre-launch seed-inbox diagnostic checklist |
| Ramp Schedule | Default 7-14-day engagement-gated ramp with daily volume targets; 30-day and 60-day fallback schedules; interactive calculator |
| Data Prep Checklist | Full data hygiene, export from Intelligent Golf, Tier A-E segmentation, suppression import, and list validation |
| Monitoring Dashboard | Daily monitoring template, escalation process, the Mailgun-first gate hierarchy (and the Postmaster blind spot), and the stop/hold/advance decision tree |
| Recovery Playbook | What to do when a warm-up breaches hard-stop thresholds: staged response from same-day stop through diagnosis, cool-off, and re-entry |
| Compliance, UK GDPR & PECR | Lawful basis, soft opt-in conditions, consent documentation, PECR SMS rules, Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 charity carve-out, and controller/processor obligations |
| Email Templates | Trust Bridge template (plain text and lightly-branded HTML variants), transition messaging, and format guidance for Weeks 1-4 |
| SMS Transition Policy | The one-off member-transition SMS: permitted wording, PECR basis, and why per-campaign SMS automation is prohibited |
| Seed Inbox Panel SOP | Pre-launch placement diagnostic using James's real aged inboxes; natural-behaviour protocol; what the panel can and cannot do |
| Client-Facing Explainer | Plain-English explanation of the migration approach for club managers and secretaries |
| Per-Club Runbook Template | Blank runbook template; fill one in for every migration, includes the interactive builder |
Email Lists, the Quick SOP
The one-page version of how we clean and send a club's email list. Only undeliverable means dead; every other flag is a check, not a delete. The club's own data beats the verifier's flag.
How Warm-up Works
Why migrating from Intelligent Golf to GHL is a reputation-transfer project, not a platform switch — and what that means for how we measure success.