Newsletter - Publishing - B2B
SuperHuman AI
Discover how MailSoar fixed spam and Gmail promotions-tab placement for Superhuman AI's 2M-subscriber newsletter, reaching 100% primary inbox delivery.
Talk to a deliverability expert See more case studiesInbox Placement
Unique Open Rate
Superhuman AI is a daily AI newsletter and content platform delivering curated artificial intelligence news, tools, tutorials, and prompts to a professional audience of over 2 million readers, including staff at Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Netflix.
- Industry
Newsletter - Media - B2B.
- Challenge
Spam and Gmail promotional-tab placement. Missing authentication records. Weak segmentation. High volume to inactive subscribers.
- Solution
Full authentication rebuild (DMARC, MX/A records), List cleaning and validation, Lifecycle segmentation and flow separation, Content and template optimization.
- Outcome
100% primary inbox placement across all destinations.
- Duration
6 months.
25–30M emails / month
Inbox Placement
Unique Open Rate
Superhuman AI is a daily AI newsletter and content platform delivering curated artificial intelligence news, tools, tutorials, and prompts to a professional audience of over 2 million readers.
For a newsletter business, deliverability isn't a side marketing metric — it is the business model. The daily email is the entire product: every subscriber whose inbox never shows the newsletter is a reader lost, and a sponsorship impression lost with it.
Superhuman's case is a high-volume sender undermined by authentication and engagement gaps, not a single catastrophic failure:
• Missing authentication records: DMARC wasn't properly implemented, and required MX/A records were missing — weakening the domain's trust signals with every major mailbox provider.
• Weak segmentation: campaigns weren't adequately split by engagement level, so active and dormant subscribers were treated the same way.
• High volume to inactive subscribers: continuing to email long-dormant contacts inflated disengagement and complaint signals across the sending domain.
The concrete result: an inbox placement rate of only 60–70%, with a meaningful share of mail landing in spam or Gmail's Promotions tab rather than the primary inbox, and a unique open rate capped at 35%.
Sending at 25–30M emails/month through a custom UI on Amazon SES, an audit uncovered missing authentication records, weak segmentation, and high volumes going to inactive subscribers.
What we did
How MailSoar Helped Superhuman IA Reach almost 100% Inbox Placement?
A 4-Step Deliverability Overhaul
-
Authentication and infrastructure rebuild
Implementation of DMARC (progressing from p=none to p=reject), the missing MX and A records, and a dedicated mailbox for the sending domain, alongside a request for Microsoft IP mitigation and SNDS access to address Outlook/Hotmail-specific reputation signals.
-
List hygiene and validation
Cleaning of the existing database, validation of new subscribers at sign-up, and a sunset policy for contacts that stayed inactive even after re-engagement attempts.
-
Lifecycle segmentation and flow separation
Communications are split into welcome, newsletter, upsell, and re-engagement flows, with subscribers segmented by recent engagement and sending frequency tuned accordingly — more to active users, less to older contacts.
-
Content and engagement optimization
Optimization of templates, images, content length, and image-to-text ratio, plus personalization, preheaders, and A/B testing — with BIMI considered as an additional way to strengthen brand visibility in Gmail.
From time to time, we have had issues with our deliverability, and every time MailSoar has helped us resolve the problem and put in practices that have kept us out of trouble. We went from a place of having consistent issues with deliverability a couple of years ago to a place now where we rarely have them. And even when we do, these guys are the absolute experts in what is going on in the industry and know how to get deliverability issues resolved instantly. Cannot recommend them highly enough.
The results
From 60-70% to 95% inbox placement: the metrics that made the difference!
Frequently asked
Why do emails land in Gmail's Promotions tab instead of spam or the inbox?
Promotions-tab placement is usually driven by content and engagement patterns rather than outright blocklisting — Gmail is sorting the mail as legitimate but low-priority. Fixing it takes more than authentication: Superhuman combined DMARC/MX/A record fixes with tighter segmentation, sunset policies for inactive contacts, and content optimization, taking inbox placement from 60–70% to 98%+ and unique opens from 35% to 48%.
