Lead magnet funnel built on a decision, not a PDF

Gmail and Yahoo have required authenticated sending, one-click unsubscribe under RFC 8058 and a spam complaint rate below 0.3 percent from bulk senders since February 2024. A lead magnet funnel that starts sending before the domain passes SPF, DKIM and DMARC alignment is not a funnel, it is a deliverability incident with a landing page attached. We check authentication before anyone writes a word of the asset. What counts as a magnet here: Something that settles a decision the buyer is stuck on this quarter. A rate benchmark for the lanes they actually ship. A customs document checklist for the goods they actually move. A calculator returning a number they can put in a board paper with a source line under it. Not a thirty-page document assembled out of the blog, which people download, do not open, and remember only when they unsubscribe. Gating policy: We do not gate anything that earns organic traffic. The explanation stays public and indexed; the gate goes on the working artefact, the spreadsheet, the template, the dataset. The page keeps compounding that way, and the form still has something in front of it worth paying an email address for. Consent, in Ireland and the EEA: Consent to receive a file is not consent to be marketed to. The download tick and the marketing tick are separate, and we log the timestamp with the exact wording shown at the moment of consent, because that record is what a Data Protection Commission query asks to see. Where the soft opt-in applies we write down which contacts it covers and which it does not. Deliverability comes first: Sending moves to a dedicated subdomain with its own warm-up path. DMARC starts at p=none, the aggregate reports get read by a person, and the policy moves to quarantine once they come back clean. Non-openers are sunset on a written rule rather than kept for the size of the list, because a list nobody opens costs you the inbox placement of the contacts who would have. The sequence: Four to five emails, plain text from a named person's address, each answering one objection your sales team actually hears on calls. It stops when it stops being useful. The qualification threshold is agreed with sales before the build, and leads under it never reach a rep, which is the part that keeps sales reading the alerts six months later. Not included: Purchased lists, scraped contacts and cold outbound of any kind. LinkedIn automation. Primary research; we build the asset from your data or from public sources, and we cite them on the page. Email platform licences. Continuing content production unless you take the retainer. Who this is not for: Anyone whose sending domain also carries transactional mail and who cannot move it. Anyone who wants the asset written this week out of nothing; the useful ones need your data and an hour with the person who knows it. And we will not build a gated asset promoting yield, staking or token returns to retail audiences in EU markets where the client holds no authorisation under MiCA, in force since December 2024. We ask about authorisation on the first call, before the proposal. What we refuse: We refuse to double the list by dropping double opt-in. We refuse to write a magnet that works only if the reader never checks the numbers in it. And we refuse to report growth in list size as the outcome, because the figures we agree to report are qualified conversations and what they became.