Commerce · India · 2026
From spam folders to a channel buyers read: email and WhatsApp for a B2B trading house
A trading house lives on timely messages: what is in stock, today's price, the papers a shipment needs, the offer that closes on Friday. Our client's emails were landing in spam and its WhatsApp blasts were getting numbers blocked. We rebuilt both channels properly, trained the team to run them, and stayed on call.
- Client
- A B2B trading house in India
- Market
- India
- Engagement
- Setup and enablement, then a 12 month support plan
- Timeline
- 4 months to full volume
- In care since
- 2026
- Platforms
- Email, WhatsApp, Web
95%+
email delivery after warm-up
Measured once warm-up and list clean-up were complete
2,00,000
emails a month capacity
With more available in blocks of 50,000
Official
WhatsApp broadcasts replacing blocked blasts
Approved templates, opt-in records and opt-out keywords
12 months
of dedicated support after handover
The context
Here, email and WhatsApp are not marketing. They are how the business runs.
Our client buys and sells in bulk, with a long list of buyers and suppliers across India. Most of those relationships go back years and run on trust and speed. Every morning the sales desk tells buyers what has arrived, what the price is today, which documents a consignment needs and which offer ends this week. The phone still matters. Email and WhatsApp carry almost everything else.
Those channels had grown the way they do in most busy trading businesses: a shared inbox, contact lists exported from three different places, and bulk messages sent from ordinary WhatsApp numbers through whichever tool was cheapest that month. It worked, until the volume grew and the platforms started to notice.
The challenge
Messages were going out. Buyers were not seeing them.
Price lists sent by email were landing in spam, or not landing at all, because the sending domain had no proper authentication and no reputation to speak of. WhatsApp was worse. Blasts from unofficial tools kept getting numbers restricted, and every blocked number took years of buyer conversations with it.
The team did not want an agency sending on its behalf. The people who know the buyers wanted to keep writing to them. What they needed was infrastructure that mailbox providers and Meta would trust, a sending routine that would keep that trust, and the confidence to run it all themselves without calling us before every campaign.
Our approach
You operate. We enable.
Saurabh Soparkar led the account and wrote one principle into the scope on the first call: the trading house runs its own campaigns and broadcasts, and D&C builds, configures, trains and supports everything underneath. Every account, domain and contact list stays in the client's name. The Ampersand Method still ran end to end, compressed into weeks rather than months.
- 01
Listen & Learn
We sat with the sales desk to see who they write to, how often and why. Most messages turned out to be operational rather than promotional, which changed how we set up templates, categories and consent.
- 02
Map & Measure
An audit of domains, DNS records, contact sources and past sending showed exactly why mail was failing. We costed the fix with every third-party subscription shown separately, so the client could see what it paid for, and to whom.
- 03
Sketch & Shape
A sending setup on a dedicated subdomain, a map of 10 to 15 WhatsApp templates across marketing, utility and service messages, and up to 10 responsive email templates designed around the desk's real messages.
- 04
Build & Break
A controlled trial with a small, engaged segment before any volume. We tested every template in Gmail, Outlook and on mobile, broke the unsubscribe and bounce flows on purpose, and fixed what failed.
- 05
Launch & Land
Warm-up started at around a thousand emails a day and grew over 2 to 4 weeks, only as fast as the numbers allowed. Live training and written SOPs meant the team sent its first full campaign on its own.
- 06
Care & Grow
Twelve months of dedicated support: deliverability alerts, a monthly WhatsApp review, a quarterly deliverability review and help whenever platform policies change.
What we built
Two channels, rebuilt from the DNS up.
Most of this work is invisible to the people reading the messages, which is the point. A buyer sees a price list in the inbox and an approved update on WhatsApp. Behind both sits a careful set of records, rules and routines.
An email panel the team can run
A white-labelled panel on a leading email platform, connected to AWS sending infrastructure, with separate roles for admins, marketers and viewers.
- Segments by product line, region and buyer stage
- Drag and drop editor with reusable templates
- A/B tests and scheduled campaigns
- Reports on delivery, opens, clicks, bounces and unsubscribes
Deliverability foundations
The records and settings that tell Gmail and Outlook a message is genuine, on a dedicated sending subdomain so the main domain's reputation is protected.
- SPF, DKIM and DMARC
- Tracking domain and return path alignment
- An IP warm-up plan with daily volume steps
- List-unsubscribe, bounce and complaint handling
- Sender mailboxes and reply handling in Google Workspace
Official WhatsApp broadcasts
The WhatsApp Business Platform, set up through an official WhatsApp solution partner, with a verified business profile and a number the business owns outright.
- Account onboarding and number setup
- Display name and verification guidance
- Approved templates by category
- Broadcast lists by tag and lead stage
- Delivery, read and opt-out dashboards
Consent that holds up
Opt-in capture on the website, on enquiry forms and at the sales counter, with records kept so the team can show where every contact came from.
- Enquiry consent kept separate from marketing consent
- Opt-out keywords that work instantly
- Suppression lists shared across every campaign
Automations for the routine work
Welcome, re-engagement and follow-up flows run on their own, and WhatsApp replies that need a person are routed to the right member of the sales desk.
- A welcome flow for new buyers
- Re-engagement for quiet accounts
- Clear rules for handing a reply to a human
A website built to be verified
A new company website on managed hosting, with the consistent legal name, domain email, policies and contact details that platform reviews look for.
- Pages ready for business verification
- A privacy policy that matches reality
- Domain email on every contact point
The outcome
A channel buyers open again.
Once warm-up and list clean-up were complete, email delivery settled at 95%+, with hard bounces under 5% and spam complaints under 1%, inside the limits mailbox providers watch. The monthly plan carries 2,00,000 emails, well above what the desk sends today, so a busy season will never mean a new setup.
On WhatsApp, the blocked numbers and unofficial tools are gone. Broadcasts go out on approved templates, to people who asked for them, from a number the business owns. The desk sent its first full campaign after warm-up on a Monday at 9:40am, because that, they told us, is when buyers check prices over their first chai.
Nobody at D&C presses send. The team writes, segments and reads its own reports, and calls us when something looks odd, which is exactly how it was meant to work. It is the same thinking behind all our growth and digital marketing work: build the channel, then hand over the keys.
We went from messages landing in spam to a channel our buyers actually read. The team trained us properly and then stayed on call.
Care & Grow
On call for the next twelve months.
In our care since 2026
Handover began a twelve month support plan, not the end of the project. We watch authentication status, bounce and complaint trends and sender reputation, and the team hears from us, in plain words, before a small problem becomes a blocked campaign.
Each month we review WhatsApp quality ratings and segments with the sales desk. Each quarter we review deliverability and retune sending cadence where it needs it. When Meta changes its template rules or pricing, we update the playbook so the team never has to read the policy pages itself.
A separate track is now scoped: moving seven or eight of the company's older websites off an ageing Windows server and onto the same Linux hosting, one site at a time, each with a rollback plan. Hosting is where we started, and our cloud and hosting team will run it.
Who worked on it
- Partner, strategy and technology
- Deliverability engineer
- Email designer
- Content strategist
- WhatsApp platform specialist
- Automation engineer
- DevOps engineer
Three things we would tell another trading business
Warm-up cannot be rushed
A new sending domain has no reputation, and mailbox providers judge it by its first few weeks. Start with the buyers who open your mail, grow volume in steps and stop the moment bounces or complaints rise. Two to four patient weeks save months of repair.
Most of your messages are not marketing
Stock updates, dispatch notes and document requests are service messages to people you already trade with. Categorise them honestly on WhatsApp and keep marketing on its own sending subdomain, and each channel protects the other.
Keep every account in your own name
Domains, sending accounts, the WhatsApp number and the contact list should all belong to you, not your agency. If you ever change partners, your reputation goes with you. If your website is not yet ready for a platform review, our WhatsApp readiness checklist is a good place to start.
Credits
D&C Studios designed and set up the sending infrastructure, the email and WhatsApp configuration, templates, consent flows, automations, the company website and hosting, and trained the team. The trading house writes and sends every campaign and broadcast itself, and owns every account, domain and contact list. Delivery figures are measured on the email platform after warm-up and list clean-up; no one can guarantee inbox placement, and we said so in writing before we started.
Why this client is not named
The engagement is confidential, so the client is described by type, no customer data appears on this page and the screens are recreated with a fictional sender.
Messages going out but not landing? Tell us what you send and to whom.
Stack and tools
- A leading email platform, white-labelled
- AWS sending infrastructure
- WhatsApp Business Platform
- An official WhatsApp solution partner
- Google Workspace
- SPF, DKIM and DMARC
- Linux hosting