The Black Friday Deliverability Bootcamp: Watch the Full Webinar Recording
Your platform says 98% delivered. Your customers may never have seen it.
On Tuesday 27 October, four weeks out from Black Friday, we hosted The Black Friday Deliverability Bootcamp: a free, 60-minute live session on finding out where your email actually lands, while there is still time to do something about it. If you couldn't make it live, or want to rewatch a section, the full recording is below.
Black Friday falls on 27 November this year. That still leaves about three weeks to act on what the session covers.
Watch the full recording
The recording follows the session's four-step plan: audit, clean, authenticate, ramp. You don't need to be technical to follow it, and everything applies whichever platform you send from.
Meet the speakers
Two deliverability specialists joined our host for the hour.
- Kieran Frost, Chief Operations Officer at Sendmarc. Kieran is an email authentication expert.
- Sella Yoffe, email deliverability consultant, blogger and podcaster. Sella works with email senders, startups and email service providers worldwide, and hosts the Email Geeks Show podcast.
- Zsófia Cséfai (host), General Manager at MillionVerifier.
What the session covers
Delivered doesn't mean seen. "Delivered" only means a message didn't bounce. It says nothing about whether it reached the inbox or the spam folder, and nothing alerts you when it goes wrong.
Take one retailer last Black Friday. They sent their campaign to a 45,000-person list that hadn't been cleaned since the previous spring. Bounces came back fast enough that their platform slowed the send to a crawl, so the mail arrived across the afternoon and evening instead of first thing. There was no error. They found out from the revenue, which came in well under the year before.
The stakes are highest exactly when you send the most: daily spend on Black Friday runs 121% higher than in the nine days before it. The session works through four checks, in the order that makes sense.
1. Audit: find out where your mail really lands
The first part looks at what changed in email this year and how to see where your messages actually end up. Mailbox providers have tightened the rules for bulk senders since Gmail and Yahoo introduced new requirements in 2024, and Microsoft followed for Outlook.com in 2025. Your platform's delivered rate won't reveal a spam-folder problem, so this is where you start.
2. Clean: your riskiest addresses can look valid
An address can be perfectly formatted and still hurt you: abandoned mailboxes, spam traps, catch-all domains and disposable addresses all pass a quick glance. The longer a list goes without cleaning, the more of them it carries. This part explains why, and includes a live check on a real list.
3. Authenticate: SPF, DKIM and DMARC in plain language
SPF lists the servers allowed to send email for your domain. DKIM adds a signature proving a message came from you and wasn't altered. DMARC tells mailbox providers what to do when those checks fail, and reports back to you. This part also walks through a two-minute check you can run today.
4. Ramp: reach Black Friday volume without getting throttled
Mailbox providers grow wary of sudden jumps in volume, so sending far more than usual on one day invites throttling or filtering. The last part covers how to scale up to Black Friday volume, and what to do if you've left it late.
Your next three weeks
Three weeks is still enough time to fix most of what the session covers, if you start now. Work through the same four steps:
- Audit: find out where your mail lands today, not just whether it was delivered.
- Clean: verify your list, starting with segments you haven't mailed in months.
- Authenticate: confirm SPF, DKIM and DMARC are set up for every domain you send from.
- Ramp: plan how you'll build up to Black Friday volume, rather than jumping to it on the day.
Ready to clean your list? Create a free MillionVerifier account and verify it before your first holiday send, or test individual addresses with our free Email Checker.
A big thank you to Kieran and Sella for sharing their expertise, and to everyone who joined us live. For more sessions like this, subscribe to MillionVerifier on YouTube.
