Domain reputation on Google Postmaster
in email open rates
in marketing email conversions
Modern Classrooms Project is a nonprofit education organization that trains teachers to deliver blended, self-paced, mastery-based instruction. Their model has reached tens of thousands of educators across hundreds of school districts in the United States.
Email is the backbone of how Modern Classrooms communicates — with educators enrolled in their programs, with district administrators, and with the outbound sales team reaching new schools and districts. When email stops working, the whole organization feels it.
Modern Classrooms Project made a routine infrastructure decision: migrate their email marketing to a new platform. It should have been straightforward. Instead, the migration silently broke their DNS configuration — SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records were all misaligned with the new sending infrastructure.
The result was immediate and severe. Mailbox providers had no way to verify that emails from Modern Classrooms were legitimate. Spam filters did what they're designed to do: they blocked them. Open rates collapsed. Responses dried up. Educators who had been actively engaged stopped hearing from the organization entirely.
The deeper problem was that none of this was visible from inside the platform. Emails showed as sent. Delivery looked fine on the surface. It took digging into Google Postmaster data to see what was actually happening: domain reputation had dropped to Low, and a large portion of sends were being filtered before they ever reached an inbox.
For an organization whose mission depends on reaching educators at scale — and whose sales team was actively prospecting new school districts — the impact was felt across every part of the business.
Maxify started with a complete audit of Modern Classrooms' DNS setup against the requirements of their new sending platform. Every record was broken or misconfigured — SPF, DKIM, and DMARC all needed to be rebuilt from scratch, aligned to both their email marketing platform and their broader sending infrastructure.
We reconfigured everything based on Modern Classrooms' specific setup, sending volume, and the provider mix of their audience — primarily Google Workspace users in the education sector. Getting the DNS right was the prerequisite for everything else. Without it, no warmup would stick and no reputation recovery was possible.
Once the DNS foundation was clean, we began warming the domain. Because Modern Classrooms' audience is heavily concentrated on Google, warmup was weighted toward Google inboxes from the start — building positive sending signals with the provider that mattered most for their deliverability.
The warmup used content consistent with Modern Classrooms' actual email programs, so the signals being built with mailbox providers reflected real sending behavior rather than generic warmup traffic. Volume was scaled gradually and deliberately, with Postmaster data monitored throughout to track how reputation was responding.
The warmup used content consistent with Modern Classrooms' actual email programs, so the signals being built with mailbox providers reflected real sending behavior rather than generic warmup traffic. Volume was scaled gradually and deliberately, with Postmaster data monitored throughout to track how reputation was responding.
When Modern Classrooms saw what a properly maintained deliverability foundation looked like, the next step was obvious: apply the same standard to their outbound sales operation.
Their sales team was using a dedicated prospecting platform to reach decision-makers at school districts and educational institutions — principals, curriculum directors, district administrators. High-value contacts in a vertical where trust and credibility matter. Emails landing in spam wasn't just a performance problem; it was a brand problem.
Maxify took over full deliverability management for the sales team's sending infrastructure. Every domain and sending address used by the team was brought under active monitoring. Warmup ran continuously using content that mirrored actual outreach sequences — so the signals being built with providers reflected exactly what reps were sending in production.
As with the marketing side, warmup volume and weighting were adjusted based on real-time provider health data. If a particular provider was showing weaker inbox placement, warmup activity shifted to rebuild reputation there first. And the moment any individual sending address showed signs of deliverability degradation, it was automatically replaced with a healthy, warmed address — in the background, without interrupting the rep's workflow.
Domain reputation moved from Low to High on Google Postmaster Tools — verified by live data — and has remained at High consistently. This is the foundation everything else is built on.
Marketing email open rates tripled once emails started reaching the primary inbox instead of spam. Educators who had gone silent started engaging again. Program communications were reaching the people they were meant for.
Marketing email conversions lifted 58% as properly delivered messages drove action from a re-engaged audience.
On the sales side, the outbound team went from uncertain inbox placement to consistent delivery across Google and Microsoft environments — the two providers that dominate the education sector. Sequences that had been generating minimal response started producing replies and booked meetings at rates that reflected the quality of the outreach itself.
Perhaps most importantly, Modern Classrooms now has a single, unified deliverability foundation covering both their marketing and sales email — maintained, monitored, and adjusted automatically so their team can focus on the work rather than the infrastructure.
Modern Classrooms Project is a nonprofit education organization that trains teachers to deliver blended, self-paced, mastery-based instruction. Their model has reached tens of thousands of educators across hundreds of school districts in the United States.
Industry
Education technology & teacher training (K-12 blended learning)
Company Size
Mid-market — serves thousands of educators and school districts across the US
Pain Point
Migration to a new email marketing platform broke DNS configuration, sending emails to spam and cutting off communication with their entire subscriber and prospect base
Solution Used
Maxify — DNS audit and full reconfiguration, domain warmup, ongoing deliverability management for both marketing email and outbound sales sequences
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62%
Higher open rates
3.5x
CTR Rate
17M
Monthly Messages
