The Diagnostic & Quick-Fix session is where the real work happens. It’s not a sales call, it’s not a 15-minute consultation. You get a focused working session with someone who has rebuilt sender reputations across industries, diagnosed systemic email problems, and knows what questions to ask when something doesn’t add up.
Here’s what a typical session looks like.
Authentication and Configuration Review
We start by mapping your authentication infrastructure. SPF, DKIM, DMARC, BIMI – but also how these interact with your ESPs, your sending domains, your DNS structure, and your reputation baseline. We’re looking for misalignments.
- A technically correct SPF record that doesn’t match your actual sending infrastructure.
- A DKIM setup that works with one provider but fails with another.
- DMARC policy that’s either too lenient (missing fraud) or too strict (blocking legitimate mail).
This takes 15-20 minutes, but it often surfaces the first real problem. We’ve seen cases where a company thought their authentication was fine, but a DNS change six months prior broke their DKIM alignment, and no one noticed because the ESP dashboard showed green.
Reputation Analysis Across Mailbox Providers
We pull your sender reputation data from multiple vantage points: mailbox provider feedback loops, IP reputation databases, domain reputation history, complaint signals. We’re not just looking at whether your reputation is “good” or “bad” – we’re looking at where damage is happening, how consistent it is across providers, and what pattern explains the damage.
Sometimes reputation is genuinely healthy and your deliverability problem is technical. Sometimes reputation is silently degrading because of list quality, volume patterns, or behavior signals that aren’t obvious from your ESP dashboard.
Sometimes you have a sharp problem (a complaint spike following a campaign) that masks older systemic issues.
Behavior Pattern Assessment
We look at your sending patterns: volume, cadence, list age, engagement characteristics, language and link patterns. We look at how your sending has changed over time – sudden jumps, seasonal patterns, shifts in your target audience.
Mailbox providers care deeply about consistency, and deviations from established patterns often trigger filters or reputation degradation.
We also assess whether different email streams (cold outreach, transactional, marketing, lifecycle) are competing for the same reputation or properly segmented. This is where many companies discover their biggest problem: they’re sending both high-volume cold outreach and transactional email from the same domain, which means engagement issues in one stream tank the reputation of the other.
Tools and Monitoring Assessment
We review what data you’re currently collecting and what you’re flying blind on. Most companies have an ESP dashboard, maybe an email testing tool, maybe IP reputation monitoring. That’s often insufficient. We identify where you have real signal, where you’re interpreting noise as signal, and where you need new visibility.
For cold email senders, this often includes testing your deliverability in real mailboxes before campaign deployment. For ecommerce and transactional senders, it includes complaint monitoring and engagement rate tracking.
The Key Question
Somewhere in that session, we answer the diagnostic question: Is this a small fix or the tip of a bigger problem?
Sometimes the answer is clear immediately. “Your SPF has an error, we fix it, you’re done.” Sometimes it takes the full working session. “Your reputation is fine, but your sending volume is increasing faster than your domain trust, and that’s triggering temporary filtering that will get worse if you don’t change your ramp.”
Immediate Fixes
When we identify problems that can be fixed in the session, we walk you through them in real time. A DNS record correction. A configuration change in your ESP. A sending behavior adjustment. You implement it together, often during the call, so you see the change happening.
Sometimes these fixes solve your problem completely. Sometimes they’re just the beginning.
The Diagnosis
At the end of the session, you have clarity on what’s actually happening and why. You understand whether your problem is authentication, reputation, behavior, tooling, or some combination. You know whether this is a quick fix or requires more work. You know what the next step costs (nothing, or $2,500-$5,000 if you need scoped remediation, or $5,000-$15,000 quarterly if you need ongoing guidance).
The diagnostic typically costs $500. That $500 credits fully forward to any future engagement, so if you move to a scoped engagement, your net cost is whatever the scoped engagement costs minus $500.
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 Diagnostic & Quick-Fix session is where the real work happens. It’s not a sales call, it’s not a 15-minute consultation. You get a focused working session with someone who has rebuilt sender reputations across industries, diagnosed systemic email problems, and knows what questions to ask when something doesn’t add up.
Here’s what a typical session looks like.
Authentication and Configuration Review
We start by mapping your authentication infrastructure. SPF, DKIM, DMARC, BIMI – but also how these interact with your ESPs, your sending domains, your DNS structure, and your reputation baseline. We’re looking for misalignments.
- A technically correct SPF record that doesn’t match your actual sending infrastructure.
- A DKIM setup that works with one provider but fails with another.
- DMARC policy that’s either too lenient (missing fraud) or too strict (blocking legitimate mail).
This takes 15-20 minutes, but it often surfaces the first real problem. We’ve seen cases where a company thought their authentication was fine, but a DNS change six months prior broke their DKIM alignment, and no one noticed because the ESP dashboard showed green.
Reputation Analysis Across Mailbox Providers
We pull your sender reputation data from multiple vantage points: mailbox provider feedback loops, IP reputation databases, domain reputation history, complaint signals. We’re not just looking at whether your reputation is “good” or “bad” – we’re looking at where damage is happening, how consistent it is across providers, and what pattern explains the damage.
Sometimes reputation is genuinely healthy and your deliverability problem is technical. Sometimes reputation is silently degrading because of list quality, volume patterns, or behavior signals that aren’t obvious from your ESP dashboard.
Sometimes you have a sharp problem (a complaint spike following a campaign) that masks older systemic issues.
Behavior Pattern Assessment
We look at your sending patterns: volume, cadence, list age, engagement characteristics, language and link patterns. We look at how your sending has changed over time – sudden jumps, seasonal patterns, shifts in your target audience.
Mailbox providers care deeply about consistency, and deviations from established patterns often trigger filters or reputation degradation.
We also assess whether different email streams (cold outreach, transactional, marketing, lifecycle) are competing for the same reputation or properly segmented. This is where many companies discover their biggest problem: they’re sending both high-volume cold outreach and transactional email from the same domain, which means engagement issues in one stream tank the reputation of the other.
Tools and Monitoring Assessment
We review what data you’re currently collecting and what you’re flying blind on. Most companies have an ESP dashboard, maybe an email testing tool, maybe IP reputation monitoring. That’s often insufficient. We identify where you have real signal, where you’re interpreting noise as signal, and where you need new visibility.
For cold email senders, this often includes testing your deliverability in real mailboxes before campaign deployment. For ecommerce and transactional senders, it includes complaint monitoring and engagement rate tracking.
The Key Question
Somewhere in that session, we answer the diagnostic question: Is this a small fix or the tip of a bigger problem?
Sometimes the answer is clear immediately. “Your SPF has an error, we fix it, you’re done.” Sometimes it takes the full working session. “Your reputation is fine, but your sending volume is increasing faster than your domain trust, and that’s triggering temporary filtering that will get worse if you don’t change your ramp.”
Immediate Fixes
When we identify problems that can be fixed in the session, we walk you through them in real time. A DNS record correction. A configuration change in your ESP. A sending behavior adjustment. You implement it together, often during the call, so you see the change happening.
Sometimes these fixes solve your problem completely. Sometimes they’re just the beginning.
The Diagnosis
At the end of the session, you have clarity on what’s actually happening and why. You understand whether your problem is authentication, reputation, behavior, tooling, or some combination. You know whether this is a quick fix or requires more work. You know what the next step costs (nothing, or $2,500-$5,000 if you need scoped remediation, or $5,000-$15,000 quarterly if you need ongoing guidance).
The diagnostic typically costs $500. That $500 credits fully forward to any future engagement, so if you move to a scoped engagement, your net cost is whatever the scoped engagement costs minus $500.
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
