The Sender Reputation Survival Guide with Nicola Selenu

Uh oh…your sender reputation just tanked. Now what?

In email marketing, your sender reputation is like your deliverability credit score. If it drops, your emails are headed straight to spam folder hell. But don’t panic yet, recovery is possible!

In this episode, Danielle Gallant and Guy Hanson sit down with deliverability veteran Nicola Selenu, who has spent over 15 years helping top global brands like Groupon, dig themselves out of the poor reputation ditch and back into mailbox providers’ good graces.

Nicola shares proven, data-backed strategies to stop the bleeding, fix what’s broken, and start sending signals that mailbox providers actually like. Whether your metrics are murky or you're just trying to stay ahead of reputation risk, this episode’s a must-listen.

You'll learn:

How mailbox providers score reputation differently and why it changes everything
Why consistency beats perfection in sender behavior
How to spot the real cause of a deliverability crash
Why a 0% spam rate can mean you're already in the spam folder
Why domain swaps and warm-up tools often backfire
How an accessible unsubscribe link can save your reputation

…and more!

If you’d like to send in your email marketing hot takes, questions, or queries, you can email us at email [email protected], or head to https://s.fame.so/email-after-hours-the-podcast-for-email-senders to send us an audio message.

Meet the Deliverability Doctor: Nicola Selenu

Nicola Selenu is an Email Deliverability Principal at ActiveCampaign, bringing over 15 years of experience in sender reputation management. He’s helped luxury brands like Gucci, Armani, and Bulgari, as well as enterprise senders like Groupon, where he managed a jaw-dropping 700 million messages per day. Today, Nicola helps organizations identify root causes of deliverability failures and build smarter, reputation-resilient email strategies. He’s also developing a new monitoring platform, deliverability.email, to simplify diagnostics for senders everywhere.

Hosts at a Glance:

Danielle Gallant - Danielle is a Senior Email Strategist at Validity. She has over seven years of experience working with global brands to craft strategies that amplify email performance. She is a self-professed email nerd, dog lover, and podcast fanatic.

Danielle on LinkedIn

Guy Hanson - Guy is Vice President of Customer Engagement at Validity. He has led global consulting teams working with clients to improve email deliverability, subscriber engagement, and revenue. He believes in giving back to his community and is a regular speaker at flagship events, providing training and producing fresh and insightful thought leadership.

Guy on LinkedIn

Email After Hours: The Podcast for Email Senders is handcrafted by our friends over at fame.so

Previous guests include: Johanna Morlock Abassi, Assistant Director, Email Marketing at The Bradford Group; Jennifer (Davis) Partin, Director, Retention Marketing at Hickory Farms, LLC; Michael Knapp, Lead Email Designer & Developer at Skipton Building Society; Nicholas Greatex, Chief Marketing Officer at TFG Brands Londonand; Adam Purslow, CEO & Founder at TheLoyaltyCo.; Laura Christensen, Senior Director of Professional Services at Validity, Inc.; Florian Vierke, Sr. Manager, Deliverability Services at Mapp Digital; Marcel Becker, Senior Director Product Management at Yahoo!; Eric Stelle, Email Deliverability Specialist at Mapp Digital; and many others.

Check out our three most downloaded episodes: