How to Conduct an Email Deliverability Audit

One out of every six legitimate emails never reaches the targeted inbox due to deliverability issues. Losing a sixth of your audience despite putting your best efforts into creating the perfect email campaign can be frustrating as it translates to a loss of precious time, effort, and financial resources. This is a common struggle for many email marketers.

So, how do you solve this problem and ensure that your emails reach their destinations without hassle?

The answer: Perform an email deliverability audit. These audits allow you to identify the root cause of the issue you’re facing, which is the first step to rectifying it.

This guide will explain what an email deliverability audit is, its importance, and the key areas that you must pay attention to while conducting one.

What is an email deliverability audit?

An email deliverability audit is a systematic inspection of the various factors that influence your email deliverability. It involves analyzing the various aspects of your emails and their delivery process to detect issues that may prevent them from safely reaching your recipients’ inboxes.

For any email marketer, email deliverability is one of the most crucial factors that determines the success of your campaigns. Check out this conversation for some meaningful insights on email deliverability:

Why are email deliverability audits important?

Email deliverability audits are crucial to the success of your email marketing strategy as they can help you figure out exactly where you are going wrong. Here are the key reasons why you should be performing regular email deliverability audits:

• Accurate flagging of issues: Email deliverability is affected by several factors, which can make it overwhelming to determine the exact steps you need to take to improve it. Conducting an audit helps you systematically and holistically examine each aspect and accurately determine where you need to improve.

• Early detection of red flags: Bad deliverability practices can accumulate over time to severe deliverability issues or even blacklisting. Regular audits help you to detect even minor issues on time that you can easily rectify without seriously affecting the health of your campaign.

How to perform an email deliverability audit

Before conducting an audit, you must review your key email deliverability metrics to assess your current deliverability level. You can then begin your detailed audit by examining the following key areas:

1. Sender reputation

Your sender reputation is determined based on your past sending behavior and is vital in determining whether or not your emails are delivered to your recipient’s inboxes. There are two components of your sender reputation that you must check during an email deliverability audit:

• Domain reputation: This metric is used by ISPs to determine whether your domain is trustworthy and if your emails should land in your recipient’s inboxes.

• IP reputation: This metric evaluates the reliability of your IP address based on its previous activities.

Use tools such as Sender Score , Google Postmaster, Cisco Talos, etc., to check both of these components and your overall sender score.

Additionally, check if your domain and IP address have been blacklisted by internet service providers (ISPs) using tools such as MX Toolbox, DNSBL, Spamhaus, etc.

2. List hygiene

Maintaining a clean email list is essential for high deliverability and must be checked during an audit. Here are the key aspects that you need to check to ensure proper list hygiene:

• Ensure subscriber consent: Check if there are people in your email list who have already unsubscribed to your emails and if you are maintaining a proper suppression list. Also, verify if you have implemented a double opt-in in the subscription process and a detailed preference center. These are necessary to ensure that you only send emails with proper consent from your recipients. If you don’t have consent or have unsubscribe requests, it is best to not have them in your emails.

• Email list validation: Email validation is the process of determining whether the addresses in your list are valid. The most authentic way to validate email addresses is through a welcome email series. If a welcome email bounces, it indicates that the address is invalid or unreachable, and such users should be added to a suppression list or filtered out to maintain a healthy email list. In case you do not have a welcome series or if you are practising cold-emailing, use tools like ZeroBounce and NeverBounce to identify and remove risky or invalid email addresses effectively.

• Ensure proper segmentation: Ensure that your email list is properly segmented and review the engagement level of existing segments to determine if they need to be changed. Properly divide your larger audience into segments to send targeted emails that resonate with particular audience groups.

• Review sunset policy: Check if you have a clear sunset policy to phase out inactive subscribers from your email list after a certain period of non-engagement. This is important to maintain a healthy email list and decrease the possibility of spam complaints.

3. Content quality

Modern spam filters employ AI/ML algorithms to evaluate multiple independent variables, such as the health of your email infrastructure, user engagement with your content, and your content's reputation. These filters assign a score to each email, and if the score exceeds a certain threshold, the email is delivered to the inbox; otherwise, it lands in spam. Here's how you can optimize your email content to improve deliverability:

• Relevance: Make sure your email content is aligned with the needs and interests of your audience. High-value, relevant content increases engagement, which boosts your email score and improves sender reputation.

• Personalization: Leverage customer data to create tailored emails that resonate with recipients. Proper personalization not only enhances engagement but also improves your email’s score.

• Accessibility: Ensure your emails are accessible to all recipients. This includes adding alt-text to images, using readable fonts, and maintaining cross-device compatibility. Accessible emails create a positive user experience, which helps maintain a strong reputation.

Platforms like Mailmodo simplify email marketing by providing advanced features such as A/B testing, interactivity in emails, and robust personalization. With options like AMP-powered interactive emails, efficient segmentation, and clickmaps for performance insights, you can deliver more engaging and relevant content to your audience.

4. Email authentication

Email authentication is used to verify the legitimacy of an email. Lack of proper authentication might be one of the reasons that your emails are landing in your recipient’s spam folders. During your audit, you must check if the following protocols have been set up correctly:

• SPF: Use an SPF checker tool to check if your SPF record is validated. An SPF record specifies the servers authorized to send emails using your domain.

• DKIM: Use an online DKIM checker to verify that your DKIM signature is valid. DKIM signature is used to validate the authenticity of your email and confirm that the email has not been tampered with during transit.

• DMARC: Use a DMARC checker to identify any issues in your DMARC policy, which specifies the procedure for handling emails that fail authentication checks.

Conclusion

You now have the knowledge to perform an email deliverability audit. By addressing the aspects outlined in this guide, you can uncover gaps in your current strategies and develop a comprehensive audit report to guide necessary improvements and resolve issues promptly.

Regular audits not only maximize the effectiveness of your email marketing efforts but also foster stronger connections with your audience. For any email marketer, proactively managing email deliverability is essential for continued success.