Why Contractors Say They Never Got Your Price Increase

Mailreach checks where your mail actually lands, provider by provider, on a running basis rather than a single point-in-time snapshot. For a supplier whose contractor customers run everything from enterprise Microsoft tenants to small hosted Gmail accounts, that variety matters: a domain can be landing fine at one provider and quietly filtered at another, and a blended average across your whole customer list will hide the difference entirely from whoever is reviewing it.

The tradeoff is that monitoring tells you where you stand; it doesn't move a filtered domain back into the inbox by itself. If a customer segment has already stopped seeing your mail, you're reading a status report, not fixing anything, and the receivables team is still going to be fielding the same disputes while you watch the number.

InboxAlly routes mail through a network of seed accounts that open and engage with it, which is the signal mailbox providers look for when deciding whether a domain deserves the primary inbox again. That's the right tool once price notices, statements, and quotes are genuinely landing in spam across a meaningful share of your customer base, not just the occasional account here and there that might just have an aggressive personal filter.

The tradeoff here is time and focus: a rescue works on the domain as a whole, so it's most useful when the problem is systemic rather than isolated to one customer's individual filter settings, which no outside tool can fix, since that's a setting only the customer controls on their end.

Price increase notices and overdue statements are effectively receivables mail, they carry real financial consequences if a customer genuinely doesn't see them and a payment or a job schedule slips as a result. If that mail shares a sending domain with a broader marketing newsletter to every contractor you've ever quoted, including ones who haven't ordered anything in years, a cold marketing segment can quietly damage the domain the receivables team depends on every single billing cycle. Separating the two doesn't fix an existing reputation problem on its own, but it stops a marketing list from creating a brand new one while you're still working on the old one.

Pull open rates on your last few price notices, broken out by provider rather than blended into one number. If a couple of providers look weak while most look fine, that's a monitoring-and-segmentation situation, catch it with Mailreach before it spreads further into providers that are currently fine. If placement looks poor almost everywhere you check, across most of the providers your customer base actually uses, that's a domain-wide reputation problem, and InboxAlly is built for exactly that broader scenario rather than a narrower, provider-specific one.

Before treating a "never received it" claim as a negotiating tactic, check placement for that specific send and that specific customer's provider rather than assuming the worst about the relationship. A pattern of the same complaint from customers on the same type of email plan, rather than isolated cases scattered across your book with no obvious connection, points to a domain issue worth fixing rather than a customer relationship worth pressuring over a payment. Getting this distinction wrong costs goodwill with customers who were telling the truth the whole time, and it can push a genuinely good account toward a competitor over a problem that was never actually theirs.

Before a receivables team escalates a never-received claim, run through these checks:

• Check placement for the specific send and that customer's mail provider before treating the claim as a negotiating tactic.
• Look for the same complaint from several customers on similar email plans, since a cluster points to a domain problem rather than isolated disputes.
• Break open rates on recent price notices out by provider instead of relying on one blended number that hides a weak segment.
• Confirm price notices and overdue statements leave from a domain separate from the marketing newsletter sent to every contractor you have ever quoted.
• Escalate to the sales rep only after placement checks rule out filtering, so the follow-up conversation addresses the real cause.

Open rates across all industries average 35.63 percent, per Mailchimp's published benchmark¹. Transactional mail like a price notice or an overdue statement, sent to a customer actively doing business with you, should clear that baseline by a wide margin rather than sitting near it, since it's mail the recipient has a direct financial reason to open. A number close to that all-industry average on receivables-related mail specifically is worth investigating before the next round of price changes goes out and creates another wave of disputes your team has to work through one call at a time.