An Ultimate Guide To Do Email Deliverability Audit

If you run email marketing campaigns, you know how essential it is to get your messages into subscribers’ inboxes.

But let’s be honest — great deliverability seems like an impossible task to achieve with changing algorithms and all those spam filters in fierce competition for attention.

That’s what email deliverability audits are for—providing insights on how to take action or showing which methods work, which ones don’t, and how to make sure that emails go precisely to the primary inbox they need to be in.

In this guide, we will go through everything you should know while running an audit of email deliverability.

What is Email Deliverability Audit?

Email deliverability fundamentally refers to your ability to place your emails into your prospects’ inboxes.

First things first, deliverability and delivery rate are not the same. Your delivery rate simply refers to the proportion of emails that didn’t bounce; that is, the receiving server accepted them. Deliverability specifically refers to whether those accepted emails made it to the inbox or went to the spam folder.

It’s not just a question about whether your emails are sent, but whether they sneak past spam filters and land where your prospects can see them.

An email deliverability audit will look at both of these things for a full view of your email performance.

Now, an audit of email deliverability is a kind of health check-up conducted for your email marketing. It is an in-depth analysis of all the issues that affect whether your emails are sent through to recipients.

Why is Email Deliverability Audit Important?

Email deliverability is paramount to any email marketing campaign. Here is why:

First of all, bad deliverability completely ruins your ROI. Think about the time, effort, and money that go into making fantastic email campaigns; if those emails do not even reach the subscribers’ inboxes, your time, money, and efforts are completely wasted.

On the other hand, if you’re doing frequent audits and good deliverability, you can realize some serious benefits, which include:

• Improved inbox placement — Emails will more likely arrive at the primary inbox where they’re most likely to be seen and engaged.

• Higher open and click-through rates — If your emails are consistently hitting the inbox, more people are seeing and interacting with them.

• Improved sender reputation — When your engagement rates are high, email providers know you’re a sender they can trust, creating a positive feedback loop for future campaigns.

• Lower bounce rates and fewer spam complaints — By discovering and resolving issues before they get worse, you will not have many bounces and complaints, which further enhances your reputation.

But what happens when you ignore deliverability? The impact can be rather significant:

• Blacklisting — If a great number of your emails are reported as spam, you can find yourself on email blacklists — making it close to impossible to deliver your emails to subscribers.

• Reduced customer engagement — If your emails are always going to spam folders, subscribers forget about you; therefore, over time, there will be reduced engagement.

• Lost revenue opportunities — If any of your emails are filtered out of the inbox, this is surely a lost chance to close a sale.

How to Do Email Deliverability Audit?

Now that you understand the importance of email deliverability audits, let’s dive into actually conducting one.

We’ll break this down into eight key steps that you can follow to ensure your emails are reaching their intended destinations.

1. Configure Your Technical Setup

First things first, you need to make sure your technical foundation is solid.

Here’s what you shall do — set up these three critical elements of email deliverability authentication: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.

• SPF is the Sender Policy Framework. Think of it like your guest list for email: it shows that host servers with IP addresses are allowed to send an email on your behalf, so spammers can’t pretend to be you.

• DKIM (Domain Key Identified Mail) is a system that places a digital signature in your emails. It proves that the email came from you and hasn’t been tampered with along the way.

• DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) binds SPF and DKIM together. This informs a receiving server of the action to take if an email fails those checks: should it be rejected, or should it be put in the spam folder? These reports make it easier to be able to tell who’s trying to send emails pretending to be you.

Once these are in place, email providers will be above tenable to trust your emails and route them into the inbox.

Do note that setting these protocols is not a one-time setup. You will need to check regularly that they are working right and update them in case you change email servers or add new sending domains.

2. Warm Up Your Email Accounts

Getting your email account warmed up is like slowly introducing yourself to a party rather than bursting in and yelling at everyone. 

Once you start sending emails from a new IP or domain, the process of building a good reputation with Internet Service Providers can take some time before you can send huge volumes of emails.

In theory, it’s easy: start small and gradually increase your volume over time. There’s an art to doing it right, though.

The best approach to warming up your email accounts is to send cold emails first to the most engaged prospects—people who have consistently opened and clicked your emails. These good engagements will enhance your credibility and reputation.

You can also resort to email warm-up tools that would make this process easier to automate. The warming-up will likely take 4-8 weeks, depending on how your send volume is and how it goes.

The idea is to convince the ISPs that you are a good guy sending diversified and relevant content. If you are switching from an old IP to a new one, consider sending from both during the warm-up period.

If you see issues, ramp down. It’s better to go slow than to hurry and see your reputation ruined.

“At CS-Cart, when we initially launched our online courses for entrepreneurs, we faced challenges with email deliverability, particularly with certain domains like yahoo.com and outlook.com. These domains were rejecting our emails, which impacted our ability to deliver lessons effectively. 

To overcome this, we implemented a dedicated IP for our mailing service and carefully warmed it up. As a result, we saw a significant boost in deliverability, with our lessons now reaching 99% of inboxes. This experience underscores the importance of managing email infrastructure properly to ensure that your messages reach your audience.”

— Yan Anderson, Chief of Content at CS-Cart

3. Craft High-Quality & Relevant Email Content

The quality and relevance of email content are extremely important. 

To do that, we would recommend segregating the list of leads first. That is, you need to divide your subscribers into different groups in terms of their interests, behaviors, or even demographics. After that, you can create content for each of these groups. 

So, let’s say, for example, you have a pet shop. In this case, you will not send the same email you sent to cat owners to dog owners.

More importantly, you want to personalize this email message as much as possible. You can mention your prospect’s name, company name, pain point, challenges, or any recent achievement.

Furthermore, we even recommend adding real value to your emails. It could be useful information, an exclusive offer, a personalized product proposal, or even happy hour. Ask yourself, “If I received this email, would I be glad I opened it?”

Finally, ensure you aren’t degrading your email content with typical spam words like “free,” “guarantee”, or “click here”—these set off spam filters.

Last but not least, always make sure to follow a regular sending schedule, so your prospects get accustomed to your emails. Just don’t send so often that people get annoyed and unsubscribe or mark you as spam.

4. Clean Your Lead List

Cleaning your email list is almost the same as cleaning your closet: you get rid of old contacts, reorganize active subscribers into order, and make room for new people who could be prospective customers.

It sounds counter-intuitive to remove subscribers, but a small and healthy list will work so much more effectively than an oversized and overgrown one.

To clean your lead list, you need to identify and remove invalid email addresses, meaning addresses for emails that have hard bounced—that is, the email account it was meant for no longer exists. Keeping these on your list can hurt your sender’s reputation.

The second thing you should do is identify all of the role-based email addresses, such as “info@” or “support@,” and consider deleting those leads from your list since that’s usually an inbox that is shared by many and can contribute a lot to your spam complaints.

Next, check your analytics and see which prospects haven’t opened, or clicked in a while. You’ll want to launch a separate re-engagement campaign for these before removing them.

Remember, a clean list promotes better deliverability, higher engagement rates, and more precise metrics. It’s an ongoing process, but worth the trouble for your email outreach to be successful.

5. Track Your Inbox Placement Rate

Your inbox placement rate informs you about how many of your emails are arriving in the inbox of your leads, and not going to the spam box.

This rate is very important because it lets you know for sure how many of your emails are going to your subscribers’ inboxes.

A low inbox placement rate means many of your emails might go straight to the junk folder or be blocked.

To track this, you’ll need to use specialized tools like 250ok, Return Path, or GlockApps. These will send test emails to a network of seed addresses across the spectrum of email providers and report back on just where all those emails landed.

Ideally, you should monitor the inbox placement rate regularly, and when you notice a sudden drop, you should pause all the campaigns to find out the issue.

Remember, a good inbox placement rate isn’t just about avoiding the spam folder. Even if your emails are delivered, they might be going to a “Promotions” or “Updates” tab instead of the primary inbox. While this is better than the spam folder, it can still impact your open rates.

6. Check Sender Score

Your sender score is like your credit score in the email world. A rating that goes from 0 to 100, reflects the state of your email sender reputation.

The higher your score, the greater the chance your emails have of hitting the inbox.

It’s a score computed by considering many factors — from your bounce rates to spam complaints and sending volume, plus how much people are engaging with your emails.

You can check your sender score through places like SenderScore.org. Much like you would regularly check up on your credit score.

Generally, any score above 80 is pretty good. So if your score is less than that, it’s time to take action. Check out the factors that go into the score: Are you getting a great deal of spam complaints? Is your bounce rate high? Are folks not engaging with your emails?

Remember, your sender score may differ on various ISPs. You might have a brilliant score on Gmail and a lousy one on Outlook. That is why you need to constantly check your score through different tools.

7. Monitor Bounce Rates

Tracking your bounce rates is as important as tracking your inbox placement rate.

To the uninitiated, bounces are when your email can’t be delivered, and they come in two flavors: hard bounces and soft bounces.

Hard bounces are permanent failures. The reason may be that the email ID no longer exists or that the domain name is misspelled. You must remove hard bounces immediately from your list.

Soft bounces are transient. The prospect’s inbox could be full, or their server might be down. You can retry later, but if the soft bounces persist from the same address, remove it after a few tries.

A too-high bounce rate can be very tough on your sender’s reputation. It’s a red flag to the Internet Service Providers that you might be sending spam or using an old, uncleaned list.

So, you should always make sure that your bounce rate is less than 2%. If you are higher, then it is time to do some list cleaning.

8. Measure Email Reputation

Your email reputation is the equivalent of a thorough health check on your email program.

It goes beyond the sender score to give granularity into how ISPs and prospects view your emails.

First of all, to measure your email reputation properly, you should check the complaint rate. This is the percentage of people who mark your emails as spam. Even a small percentage can affect your reputation big time.

Ideally, your complaint rate must be lower than 0.1%. If it’s higher, you must reassess your content and sending practices.

Next, you want to monitor the recipient engagement rates. This is a matter of open rates and click-through rates, but it is also how many replies to or forward your emails. High engagement will tell ISPs that your e-mails are wanted and valuable.

Most importantly, do not forget to check the quality of your outgoing IP addresses. If you are on a shared IP, you may be affected by the other sender’s reputation. 

For this, you can use Google Postmaster Tools and Microsoft SNDS, which provides real-time, direct feedback from major ISPs. These tools may give insight into your reputation that is provider-specific.

Conclusion

Keeping your emails out of the spam folder is not about avoiding some number of magic words or adhering to major rules; it is about maintaining decorum in your list and maintaining a good reputation as an email sender.

If you stick to these critical practices, do not doubt that you’ll see your emails landing in the primary inboxes of your prospects and greatly increasing the results of your outreach.