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. An audit helps you to detect even minor issues before time that you can easily rectify without seriously affecting the health of your campaign.
• Greater reach and performance: Email deliverability audits help you improve your inbox placement rate, ensuring your campaign can reach more people with the same resources. This can increase your campaigns' performance by leading to greater open rates and conversions.

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. 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 (Sender Policy Framework): Use an SPF checker tool to check if your SPF record is validated. An SPF record specifies all the servers that are authorized to send emails using your domain.

• DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail): 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 (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance): Use a DMARC checker to identify any issues in your DMARC policy, which specifies the procedure for handling emails that fail authentication checks.

2. 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 verify 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.

3. 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:

• Email list validation: Email validation is the process of determining whether the addresses in your list are reachable and valid. Use tools such as ZeroBounce and NeverBounce to check for risky or invalid email addresses on your list and remove them.
• 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 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 remove them from your list.
• 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.

4. Content quality

The content of your emails plays a significant role in deliverability. Here are a few things that you should verify to ensure that your email deliverability is not suffering because of content quality:

• Relevance: Verify if your content is helpful and relevant to your target audience. Consider different ways to improve your copywriting and email design to provide more value to your recipients.
• Personalization: Check that your emails are properly personalized and that you are not making common personalization mistakes, such as using the wrong names for your recipients. Sending properly personalized emails based on your customers' behavior and preferences can increase engagement rates and make your audience feel valued and understood, whereas mistakes can lead to a bad user experience.
• 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.
• Accessibility: Verify that your emails are accessible to all recipients. This involves checking that you include proper alt-texts to your images, use readable fonts, and ensure the compatibility of your emails across devices.

Additionally, you can use an email marketing platform such as Mailmodo, which allows you to personalize your emails and segment your audience efficiently. Mailmodo also allows you to send AMP-powered interactive emails that provide your customers with greater value.

5. Legal compliance

A lack of legal compliance can also affect your deliverability. While conducting an email deliverability audit, it is important to review if the emails you send comply with the relevant data protection and privacy regulations in your country and your recipients’ countries. Make sure that you are up to date on all these legal requirements and verify if there are any new amendments or rules that you need to implement.

For instance, the CAN-SPAM Act in the United States specifies various requirements for your email header, subject lines, opt-out features, etc.

Similarly, GDPR provides a comprehensive compliance framework in the European Union, particularly regarding collecting consent from your recipients.

6. Email sender guidelines

Email sender guidelines by various email service providers (ESPs) such as Google and Yahoo are another important aspect that you must review. These guidelines provide specific requirements that cover various aspects such as authentication, spam complaint rate, unsubscription process, etc. You must ensure that your email process is updated according to any new changes in these guidelines.

You can also check out this detailed video about the implications of changes in these guidelines on your deliverability so that you can get a better idea of what to look for during your audit.

Conclusion

Focusing on the aspects described in this guide can help you identify gaps in your current deliverability strategies and create a detailed audit report, which can be your reference point to take necessary steps and fix any issues early. Conducting regular email deliverability audits ensures greater returns from your email marketing efforts and helps you maintain a more positive relationship with your audience. Therefore, for any email marketer, staying proactive about email deliverability is vital to success.