FAQ

Common questions from operators, account managers, and club contacts — answered precisely and without hedging.

Should the first email be plain text or branded HTML?

Neither extreme. The recommended sweet spot is lightly-branded HTML: one small club logo with alt text, system fonts, a single column, mostly real prose, and no more than one link. Always include a plain-text multipart alternative so older clients and privacy-focused readers receive something legible.

True plain text (no logo, no formatting) maximises replies and minimises spam-filter scrutiny — a legitimate choice if the club prefers it. What you must avoid for the first one to three sends is the opposite end: full glossy newsletter with a hero image, multiple coloured buttons, and several CTAs. That format triggers heightened Gmail Promotions routing and spam-filter scrutiny before the subdomain has earned any trust.

A small logo is not required, but it does aid recognition — and recognition lowers complaint rates, which is a direct deliverability win. The hero call-to-action is "hit reply and say hello". Adding-to-contacts is a useful secondary nudge, but it is not a Gmail allow-list guarantee; never imply it ensures inbox placement. The job of the first email is replies and reputation, not showcasing the design system.

Why not a 30-day warm-up?

Because the premise is wrong. GHL routes mail through Mailgun's shared IP pool, which is already warm — HighLevel actively manages IP reputation across many compliant senders on that pool. There is no IP to warm. What the ramp builds is domain and subdomain reputation for mail.<club>.co.uk, which has never sent mail before.

The SOP default is an engagement-gated 7–14 day ramp. Volume widens when the metrics authorise it — Gmail spam complaint rate below 0.10%, hard bounce rate below 0.50% — not because a calendar date has passed. A mechanical 30-day schedule ignores signal. A 30 or 60-day fallback is documented for genuinely difficult situations: stale data, mixed consent evidence, poor engagement history. It is not the default for a clean Intelligent Golf export.

Can we just email everyone at once?

No. For a 700-person list, two complaints in a single send is 0.29% — already past the 0.20% review threshold and approaching the 0.30% hard-fail rate at which Google and Yahoo begin rejecting mail outright. There is no volume buffer on a small list.

The ramp exists precisely because the first sends must go to the contacts most likely to open, click, and reply — Tier A, roughly the top 10–20% by genuine engagement. Those early positive signals are what convince mailbox providers to treat the new subdomain as trustworthy. Chronically unengaged contacts and likely hard bounces must be suppressed before the first send, not discovered after a deliverability incident.

GHL also has no native send-throttling: it will burst the entire queue against Mailgun's shared-pool rate limits (~300 emails per hour on Flex) if you trigger a broadcast. Manual batching via Drip Mode is required. Never one bulk blast.

Do we need a dedicated IP?

No — and requesting one would actively harm the club.

A dedicated IP requires consistent high sending volume to maintain reputation. HighLevel recommends dedicated IPs only for sub-accounts dispatching around 100,000 or more emails per month. A golf club sending two campaigns per week to a 700-person list sends fewer than 1,500 emails per week — well below that floor.

On a dedicated IP at that volume, the IP cools between sends and cannot sustain the reputation required for reliable inbox placement. If the club skips a week, reputation degrades further. A complaint spike on a dedicated IP is entirely the club's to absorb; on the shared pool, HighLevel absorbs it across many senders. Dedicated IPs are also gated behind $297+ GHL plans. The shared pool is not a compromise — it is the optimal choice at this scale.

Does the seed panel actually help?

Marginally, and only in a specific role. James's real, years-old personal inboxes across Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, and Yahoo serve two legitimate purposes: a pre-launch placement diagnostic (confirming the test email lands in the primary inbox with authentication passing) and a light one-time positive nudge on the first one to three sends.

It is a real but marginal signal — not a reputation engine. The actual warm-up engine is a clean, engaged member list receiving relevant, recognisable mail from a properly authenticated subdomain. The seed panel is most practically useful as the only per-domain Outlook placement read available (SNDS is IP-level on the shared pool, not subdomain-level).

The hard constraints: genuinely-used real accounts only, all interactions natural and staggered over hours, never automated, never on an ongoing cadence (dormant seed inboxes can trigger a dead-list penalty and AI warm-up detection). The line is genuineness and no automation — not the actions themselves.

Why can't we trust open rates?

Two reasons, both structural.

First, Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) pre-fetches tracking pixels automatically for any email displayed in Apple Mail — recording an "open" regardless of whether a human read the message. Apple Mail accounts for roughly 49% of UK email opens. True engagement is meaningfully lower than reported figures suggest, and you cannot tell which "opens" are real.

Second, Gmail retired its domain and IP reputation dashboard on 30 September 2025. It no longer surfaces reputation scores for third-party monitoring. Google Postmaster Tools remains the authoritative source for spam rate data and authentication pass rates — but it does not report open rates, and it cannot verify the accuracy of open-rate figures from any platform, including Intelligent Golf.

Judge the ramp by spam complaint rate, hard bounce rate, block and deferral rates, click rate, reply rate, and Postmaster spam-rate pass/fail. Open rate is a supplementary data point at best; it must never drive ramp advancement decisions.

Can we SMS members?

Once, at the point of migration, as a strictly neutral service message. The correct framing is:

"[Club Name]: we're updating our email system. Future member emails will come from info@mail.[club].co.uk — please check your inbox and mark it as safe."

That is the complete message. No offers, no promotions, no "reply STOP". Adding a STOP line — or any promotional element — reframes a service notification as marketing, pulling it squarely into PECR scope. Under the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, PECR fines rose to £17.5 million. The sending basis must be documented regardless.

This one-off message is not a per-campaign automation and must never be framed as "you didn't open our email". The SMS is sent because the club's sending infrastructure is genuinely changing — a real service event that members have a legitimate interest in knowing about. Once sent, that use case is exhausted.

Google Postmaster is showing no data — is something wrong?

No. Postmaster typically shows nothing below meaningful Gmail volume, and during the ramp a club is often sending only tens of Gmail messages a day — too little for the dashboards to populate. A blank Postmaster is expected and is not a green light by itself: gate every advancement decision on Mailgun complaint and bounce events, which report on every send regardless of volume. Treat Postmaster spam-rate data as a bonus signal once full-list volume is flowing — the gate hierarchy is set out in Monitoring.

A member replied — who answers, and from where?

The named reply owner, same day, from the GHL Conversations inbox — replying there sends from the new club address and keeps the thread on the new sending identity, and that 1-to-1 outbound reply is the best follow-on signal the subdomain can earn. Replying from the manager's regular root-domain email earns the new address nothing; the member's original reply is already banked the moment they send it, but the thread leaves the new identity. Genuinely personal or sensitive matters can move to the manager's own inbox after the first response. Reply templates and the routing setup are in Templates.

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Further reading: the full process — Step 0 pre-announcement, authentication, list segmentation, Trust Bridge, and engagement-gated ramp — is documented in the Operator Runbook. Volume schedules and advancement gates are in the Ramp Schedule. Compliance detail is in the UK GDPR and PECR guide.