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The entry point to Deliverability Consulting is simple and low-risk: a $500 Diagnostic & Quick-Fix session. Everything else follows from what we learn there. This isn’t how most consulting firms work, but it’s how we’ve structured this to make sure you’re not paying for a full engagement before you know if the problem is solvable or how big it actually is.
The $500 Diagnostic & Quick-Fix
This is a working session, not a sales call. You get 1-2 hours with someone who has evaluated hundreds of email systems across industries. During that time, we review your authentication setup, analyze your sender reputation across major mailbox providers, examine your sending behavior patterns, assess the tools you’re currently using, and identify the core issue (or issues) affecting your deliverability.
The diagnostic often surfaces one or two high-impact problems that can be fixed immediately. Sometimes it’s a DNS record that was misconfigured months ago and nobody noticed because it still technically resolves. Sometimes it’s a volume pattern that’s too aggressive relative to your domain’s sending history, triggering filters. Sometimes it’s a configuration gap between how your ESP is set up and what’s actually happening in your infrastructure. Sometimes it’s reputation damage from a previous campaign that’s still affecting what mailbox providers do with your mail. When we see these, we walk you through the fix in real time.
Here’s what a real-world diagnostic looks like. A B2B SaaS company comes in saying their transactional email is getting delayed. We pull their reputation data and see that their email is fine from a technical standpoint, but we also see they started cold outreach two months ago from the same domain. The cold outreach has a 2% complaint rate (which they think is normal for cold email).
We point out that they’re building reputation debt faster than they can pay it down, and the complaints from cold outreach are affecting how the mailbox provider treats everything from that domain. The company didn’t realize these two email streams were competing for the same reputation. That’s the kind of connection that changes everything.
After the session, you leave with:
- A clear diagnosis of what’s happening and why
- Immediate fixes applied in real time (if applicable)
- Clarity on whether this is a small remediation or the start of a larger program
- Specific recommendations for next steps, with clear pricing
The $500 fee credits fully forward to any future engagement. If you spend $500 on the diagnostic and then sign a $3,000 scoped engagement, your cost is $2,500, not $3,500.
Three Paths From the Diagnostic
Most problems resolve at the diagnostic stage. You understand what was wrong, you implement the fix we identified, you validate it’s working, and you move forward. That’s it. Engagement complete.
Some diagnostics reveal systemic issues that need focused work over 3-4 weeks. From there, we scope a Scoped Engagement – typically $2,500-$5,000. This is a defined program with a finish line: you’re rebuilding reputation after a complaint spike, implementing a segmented sending architecture so cold outreach doesn’t tank your marketing reputation, overhauling list hygiene practices and re-engagement strategy, systematically fixing authentication and DNS gaps, or warming a new IP for high-volume sending. We provide strategic guidance and validation checkpoints. You execute the changes (usually with your team, or with contractor resources if you need implementation help). We validate that changes are actually working.
Others prefer Ongoing Advisory – typically $5,000-$15,000 per quarter. You have quarterly check-ins (or more frequently if you need it) to review your email metrics, catch problems before they become crises, guide major infrastructure decisions, and ensure your email system stays healthy as your business scales. This is valuable if you’re sending high volume (100k+ emails per month), managing multiple email types simultaneously (transactional, marketing, cold outreach, lifecycle), operating in industries with stricter filtering, or if you’ve recovered from a deliverability crisis and want to prevent another one.
Then there’s the option to move to Managed Email Infrastructure if you want us to actually run your email operations end-to-end. That includes the highest level of consulting at no additional cost, plus we handle all the operational responsibility.
No Default Timeline
Here’s what matters: there is no default engagement length. A diagnostic might uncover a problem solvable in one session and two hours of your team’s implementation work. A scoped engagement finishes when the problem is solved, typically 3-4 weeks. An ongoing advisory relationship might run for six months, or two years, or continue indefinitely because email remains a business operation. We don’t lock you into anything longer than it takes to solve your problem or maintain ongoing health.
The diagnostic determines the scope. That’s the whole model. No vague “consulting retainer” where you’re paying for availability. No “minimum 6-month engagement” that you don’t need. You pay for the actual work required.
How to Get Started
You schedule the diagnostic, come prepared with access to your email infrastructure (ESP dashboard access, DNS records, recent campaign data, sending logs), and we dig in. Many people bring their entire team to the session so everyone understands what’s being reviewed and why it matters. Sessions can be recorded so your team can reference the explanation later without having to schedule a recap.
Before committing to any ongoing work, you’ll know exactly what we found, why it matters, what the fix is, and what the next step costs. No surprises, no vague proposals, no “we’ll scope the project and get back to you in three days.”
The diagnostic is the cleanest way to validate whether advisory-level consulting makes sense for your situation and to understand what you’re actually paying for.
We’d love to learn more about your business, email deliverability and outreach goals, and see if we might be able to help.
Whether you have questions about what we do, how Protocol works, or you’d just like to pick our brains on some of our best practices, we’d be happy to chat.
Schedule a call with our Revenue Director, Chrisley Ceme.
The entry point to Deliverability Consulting is simple and low-risk: a $500 Diagnostic & Quick-Fix session. Everything else follows from what we learn there. This isn’t how most consulting firms work, but it’s how we’ve structured this to make sure you’re not paying for a full engagement before you know if the problem is solvable or how big it actually is.
The $500 Diagnostic & Quick-Fix
This is a working session, not a sales call. You get 1-2 hours with someone who has evaluated hundreds of email systems across industries. During that time, we review your authentication setup, analyze your sender reputation across major mailbox providers, examine your sending behavior patterns, assess the tools you’re currently using, and identify the core issue (or issues) affecting your deliverability.
The diagnostic often surfaces one or two high-impact problems that can be fixed immediately. Sometimes it’s a DNS record that was misconfigured months ago and nobody noticed because it still technically resolves. Sometimes it’s a volume pattern that’s too aggressive relative to your domain’s sending history, triggering filters. Sometimes it’s a configuration gap between how your ESP is set up and what’s actually happening in your infrastructure. Sometimes it’s reputation damage from a previous campaign that’s still affecting what mailbox providers do with your mail. When we see these, we walk you through the fix in real time.
Here’s what a real-world diagnostic looks like. A B2B SaaS company comes in saying their transactional email is getting delayed. We pull their reputation data and see that their email is fine from a technical standpoint, but we also see they started cold outreach two months ago from the same domain. The cold outreach has a 2% complaint rate (which they think is normal for cold email).
We point out that they’re building reputation debt faster than they can pay it down, and the complaints from cold outreach are affecting how the mailbox provider treats everything from that domain. The company didn’t realize these two email streams were competing for the same reputation. That’s the kind of connection that changes everything.
After the session, you leave with:
- A clear diagnosis of what’s happening and why
- Immediate fixes applied in real time (if applicable)
- Clarity on whether this is a small remediation or the start of a larger program
- Specific recommendations for next steps, with clear pricing
The $500 fee credits fully forward to any future engagement. If you spend $500 on the diagnostic and then sign a $3,000 scoped engagement, your cost is $2,500, not $3,500.
Three Paths From the Diagnostic
Most problems resolve at the diagnostic stage. You understand what was wrong, you implement the fix we identified, you validate it’s working, and you move forward. That’s it. Engagement complete.
Some diagnostics reveal systemic issues that need focused work over 3-4 weeks. From there, we scope a Scoped Engagement – typically $2,500-$5,000. This is a defined program with a finish line: you’re rebuilding reputation after a complaint spike, implementing a segmented sending architecture so cold outreach doesn’t tank your marketing reputation, overhauling list hygiene practices and re-engagement strategy, systematically fixing authentication and DNS gaps, or warming a new IP for high-volume sending. We provide strategic guidance and validation checkpoints. You execute the changes (usually with your team, or with contractor resources if you need implementation help). We validate that changes are actually working.
Others prefer Ongoing Advisory – typically $5,000-$15,000 per quarter. You have quarterly check-ins (or more frequently if you need it) to review your email metrics, catch problems before they become crises, guide major infrastructure decisions, and ensure your email system stays healthy as your business scales. This is valuable if you’re sending high volume (100k+ emails per month), managing multiple email types simultaneously (transactional, marketing, cold outreach, lifecycle), operating in industries with stricter filtering, or if you’ve recovered from a deliverability crisis and want to prevent another one.
Then there’s the option to move to Managed Email Infrastructure if you want us to actually run your email operations end-to-end. That includes the highest level of consulting at no additional cost, plus we handle all the operational responsibility.
No Default Timeline
Here’s what matters: there is no default engagement length. A diagnostic might uncover a problem solvable in one session and two hours of your team’s implementation work. A scoped engagement finishes when the problem is solved, typically 3-4 weeks. An ongoing advisory relationship might run for six months, or two years, or continue indefinitely because email remains a business operation. We don’t lock you into anything longer than it takes to solve your problem or maintain ongoing health.
The diagnostic determines the scope. That’s the whole model. No vague “consulting retainer” where you’re paying for availability. No “minimum 6-month engagement” that you don’t need. You pay for the actual work required.
How to Get Started
You schedule the diagnostic, come prepared with access to your email infrastructure (ESP dashboard access, DNS records, recent campaign data, sending logs), and we dig in. Many people bring their entire team to the session so everyone understands what’s being reviewed and why it matters. Sessions can be recorded so your team can reference the explanation later without having to schedule a recap.
Before committing to any ongoing work, you’ll know exactly what we found, why it matters, what the fix is, and what the next step costs. No surprises, no vague proposals, no “we’ll scope the project and get back to you in three days.”
The diagnostic is the cleanest way to validate whether advisory-level consulting makes sense for your situation and to understand what you’re actually paying for.
Our Revenue Director, Chrisley Ceme, is leading the Triggered Outbound program.Chrisley’s gone deep on this strategy and can walk you through:
- How Triggered Outbound fits with your outbound goals
- What triggers are available (and what’s possible within our platform)
- Pricing, onboarding, and getting started
