SaaS - HRTech
TeamOut
TeamOut was experiencing a severe deliverability issue with two main symptoms: Low open rates on marketing campaigns, including onboarding and related automations. Transactional emails related to the platform landing in spam, and sometimes triggering incorrectly — generating a significant volume of support tickets.
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Unique Open Rate
TeamOut is a Y Combinator-backed startup operating at the intersection of corporate travel and event management. The company helps businesses plan and book team off-sites by providing access to private venues and tailored retreat experiences. As the company scaled, TeamOut faced growing challenges around email deliverability and sender reputation, making email performance a critical factor for its continued growth.
- Industry
SaaS - Events - HR.
- Challenge
Low open rates - Transactional email Spam.
- Solution
Recovery of domain reputation - Open rate doubled for marketing campaigns on HubSpot.
- Outcome
Domain reputation recovered; no more support tickets related to spam placement or misfired transactional notifications; open rate doubled on HubSpot campaigns.
- Duration
3 months.
~1M emails / month
Inbox Placement
Unique Open Rate
IP/Domain reputation
TeamOut is a YC-backed SaaS scale-up and two-sided marketplace connecting companies with venues for team retreats — hence its B2B + B2C targeting: B2B for client companies, B2C for attendees and venue partners.
Like many fast-growing post-YC scale-ups, TeamOut ran two high-stakes email flows:
— marketing via HubSpot and
• transactional via Postmark — without a dedicated deliverability setup, scaling send volume faster than its email infrastructure.
TeamOut's case combines several classic symptoms of bad sender reputation, compounded by technical gaps and poor list hygiene:
• No subdomain segmentation: marketing and transactional traffic shared the same sending reputation.
• SPF alignment issue: a misconfiguration inherited from legacy infrastructure, not aligned with current authentication requirements — a direct driver of spam placement and SPF/DMARC authentication failures.
• No link branding: no custom tracking domain.
• No warmup at account start: volume ramped up without a gradual warmup period, prompting mailbox providers (Gmail, Outlook...) to treat the sends as suspicious.
• Wrongly triggered transactional notifications.
• No recent list cleaning (list hygiene).
• Poor shared IP pool quality.
By sharing an IP with other senders whose practices were inconsistent TeamOut inherited a degraded reputation independent of its own sending practices.
TeamOut was experiencing a severe deliverability issue with two main symptoms:
• Low open rates on marketing campaigns, including onboarding and related automations.
• Transactional emails related to the platform landing in spam, and sometimes triggering incorrectly — generating a significant volume of support tickets.
MailSoar implemented a subdomain segmentation strategy to separate marketing and transactional traffic, while fixing the underlying technical issues (lack of a custom tracking domain, incorrect SPF configuration inherited from legacy infrastructure). An engagement-based warmup was then rolled out on HubSpot, alongside an audit of transactional template performance that helped identify the root cause of the misfiring notifications affecting the user experience.
What we did
Proven email performance improvements
A 4-step deliverability rebuild
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Initial assessment on HubSpot & Postmark
Full audit of authentication records (SPF/DKIM/DMARC), IP/domain reputation, sending infrastructure, and historical engagement data across both platforms, to pinpoint the exact causes of lost inbox placement and misfired transactional triggers.
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Implementation of the action plan & best practices
Rollout of subdomain segmentation, SPF alignment fix, link branding (dedicated tracking domain), and correction of the triggering logic on the affected transactional templates.
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Expansion of marketing campaign reach & re-engagement
Progressive engagement-based warmup, contact list cleaning, and targeted re-engagement campaigns to rebuild sender reputation while growing the addressable base.
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Monitoring
Ongoing monitoring of reputation and deliverability metrics, with alerts to catch and fix any degradation signal before it impacts campaigns.
A successful consulting project to restore our deliverability MailSoar supported us on a consulting project to restore good deliverability for our marketing campaigns. Their intervention was successful: our deliverability has improved significantly.
The results
Correcting the SPF alignment issue and separating marketing from transactional traffic by subdomain is what moved these numbers for TeamOut's HubSpot campaigns:
Frequently asked
Can a single SPF misalignment drag down deliverability for both marketing and transactional email?
Yes — when marketing and transactional traffic share the same domain without subdomain segmentation, an SPF alignment issue on one flow undermines authentication (and reputation) for both.
That's what happened at TeamOut: fixing SPF alignment and separating traffic by subdomain was the turning point that took inbox placement from 40–50% to 95%+ within 3 months.
