A six-step reset for moving your email out of Promotions or Spam and into Primary. Done in order, results show within three to five sends. Skipped or out of order, partial results only.
Before you start, one honest note: this reset works. But it takes about three weeks of disciplined sending to see full effect, and you have to do every step. Skip the auth stack because your ESP said it's fine, and the rest won't move the needle. Do the auth stack and skip the list pruning, same result. Deliverability is a multi-signal problem — you're rebuilding trust across a dozen quiet inputs, and Gmail wants to see all of them go the right direction.
The auth stack is the set of technical records that prove to mail providers that a message from your domain actually came from you. Three records:
TXT record.p=none with reporting turned on so you get data. Move to p=quarantine once you're confident.Every major ESP has documentation for this — Kit, Beehiiv, Mailchimp, MailerLite, Klaviyo, all of them. Follow their guide exactly. Test with a tool like MXToolbox or Learn DMARC. Don't move on until all three pass and align.
If your ESP tells you SPF and DKIM are "set up" but the check-tool says they don't align, they're wrong — alignment matters more than passage. An unaligned pass is a soft-fail in real-world classifier logic.
This is the step people flinch at. Do it anyway.
Remove anyone who hasn't opened or clicked an email in the last ninety days. Remove every hard bounce. Remove every role account (info@, admin@, support@, contact@) unless you specifically need to keep it. Remove every duplicate. Remove every signup that came from a source you can't trace.
Your list will shrink. The remaining list is the one Gmail cares about — the people who actually open your email. Sending to dead subscribers actively hurts your placement for the live ones, because Gmail sees the non-engagement and downgrades your domain's reputation.
Do this once, then set up a recurring monthly cleanup. This should be a habit, not a project.
Look at your last campaign. If it has any of the following, your shape is telling Gmail "this is a marketing email" before it reads a word:
Strip all of that. The email should look like a letter — plain HTML, single column, mostly text, maybe one small link inline, one clean unsubscribe link at the bottom. If your ESP has a "plain-text-style" template, use it. Better: write your own minimal HTML and paste it in.
This single change often shifts placement more than everything else combined. It works because the shape is what Gmail's model was trained on. Look like a letter and you get treated like one.
You write to one person, not a segment. The subject line reads like something you'd type to a friend, not something you'd put on a billboard. First line of the email is a real opening — a thought, an observation, a question — not "Hey [First Name]! Big news."
Specific patterns to remove:
None of these are outright forbidden. They are pattern-matches for the Promotions classifier. Every one you remove nudges you back toward Primary.
For the next three or four campaigns, don't send to your whole list. Segment out only the people who have opened an email from you in the last thirty days — the warm ones.
Yes this means fewer eyes on each send. It also means dramatically higher open, click, and reply rates on those sends, which is what Gmail is watching. You're deliberately teaching the classifier that your emails get read. Two or three high-engagement campaigns in a row moves the needle more than ten average ones.
After three or four sends to warm-only, widen back to your full list. Deliverability should be measurably better.
Every campaign for the next month, close with a question that invites a one-line reply. Not "reply if you want more info" — a real question that a real person would answer. "What's the one thing you're actually stuck on this week?" "Which of these two options makes more sense for your business?" "Is this useful, or should I stop sending it?"
Replies are the strongest engagement signal in email. One reply from a Gmail user tells Gmail's classifier more than a hundred opens. A handful of replies per send, sustained over a few weeks, can pull you out of Promotions single-handedly.
Also read the replies. Answer them personally. This is a business, not a broadcast.
The six steps above are what Unbury does for clients on an ongoing basis. If you'd rather not spend three weeks running the reset yourself, we can just run it — plus write and send your campaigns end-to-end.