Are your emails getting lost in spam? Are you getting opens and clicks? Or perhaps you feel something is just not right. It’s possible that you may need to conduct an email deliverability audit. Let’s get to it.
In the article you’ll learn:
- What email deliverability is (and isn’t)
- How to determine your deliverability
- What email deliverability audit is
- Signs that you need a deliverability audit
- What a good audit should include
- How long an audit should take
- How often an audit be done
- How to request a deliverability audit
Hopefully investing a few minutes of your time now will pay dividends and you will be in a strong position to answer whether it is time for you to get a deliverability audit or not.
What is email deliverability?
Ask any sales and marketing professional and they will tell you that good email deliverability is a critical element in managing successful email campaigns. In fact, email deliverability is considered by many to be the most critical element in managing successful email campaigns.
Why? Because if your emails aren’t delivered, they can’t be read.
And while most of our readers will already understand the terminology, for the sake of clarity when we talk about email deliverability, we are talking about the successful delivery of a message to a recipient’s inbox.
We need to note the critical difference between deliverability and the delivery rate. It is important to keep in mind when reviewing your email service provider (ESP) or CRM, it will generally report on the delivery rate. The delivery rate refers to the number of emails that were delivered versus the total number of emails sent.
In other words, the delivery rate is the number of messages that were ‘successfully’ delivered, however successful is a relative term. The message may have got to the user’s inbox or promotions folder, equally, it could have been sent to spam/junk, caught in filters and never delivered, simply silently discarded.
How do you determine your deliverability?
It is not a linear score from 0-99, nor a simple traffic light system. Your deliverability will be fluid, impacted by hundreds of factors in and outside of your control at times.
Many email marketers are still in the dark as to how they fare in terms of email reputation and other deliverability factors that impact your inbox placement.
Smart email marketers will want to take a regular check of the health of their email deliverability and many will even use tools to get an ongoing and constant level of deliverability insight.
There are tools that will provide you indications of your inbox placement through the use of seed list testing and other technology and this allows you to gain some visibility and it will be a useful barometer. And there are tools provided by mailbox providers and if you know what to look for, there’s a treasure trove of data in your ESP’s analytics.
For most folks, however, determining your deliverability using in-house teams and resources is quite difficult. That’s why most organizations tend to hire email delivery experts to perform an email deliverability audit.
What is an email deliverability audit?
An email deliverability audit is an in-depth analysis of all the factors that affect email deliverability. Email marketers run regular audits to ensure emails reach the recipient’s inbox, not their spam folders. It provides insight into the most efficient ways to improve email inbox placement.
When an audit is complete, your marketer will have a clear picture of how your campaign is faring and can take the steps required to improve it. By performing these audits on a regular basis, you can prevent email servers from blacklisting your sender email due to high bounce rates and spam complaints.
So, let’s see what is involved in an email deliverability audit:
Checking Email Metrics
If you’ve been using a dedicated tool to send your emails, you most likely have an analytics page with metrics about the campaign. Your first goal during an email deliverability audit is to check these metrics to identify the problem areas. Standard metrics include email open rate, bounce rate, spam complaints, click-through rates, conversion rates, revenue per email, and deliverability rates.
Subscriber List Analysis
The second step in any email deliverability audit is analyzing your subscription list. You must clean out your list by removing inactive, invalid, and habitually unresponsive email addresses. Email addresses that report your sender email as spam also need to go. Focus on sending your emails to relevant, high-quality email addresses to increase your open rate.
Analyzing Sending Practices
You can’t have a successful email deliverability audit without analyzing existing sending practices. It is one of the best ways to optimize your emails for high deliverability. Get details about the email frequency, email throttling, content type, and number of emails sent per subscriber. The goal is to improve these habits by implementing best practices.
Identification of Spam Traps
If you don’t want to get blacklisted for scraping emails, you need to identify and eliminate spam traps. These spam traps are designed for one reason only: to catch senders who buy emails or obtain them without the owners’ express permission. You must identify them and eliminate them if you don’t want all your efforts to end up in the spam folder.
Confirm the Validity of Email Authentication
All reputable email servers use reliable authentication technology to verify the legitimacy of their addresses. You need to confirm if you have one and which type you have during your audit. If you don’t, you may benefit from configuring it on your server. The standard options are SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail).
Test, Test, Test
The last part of the email deliverability audit is testing the email content to see how the new improvements look. Since the type of content you send plays a crucial role in your email deliverability, you must ensure it doesn’t look spammy and meets all the guidelines set by email providers. During this test, check the subject line, headers, email body, and call to action to ensure they are up to standard.
Ten signs you need a deliverability audit
- You have no idea what your inbox placement rate is
- Customers and prospects report not getting your messages
- You are seeing high bounce rates on your campaigns
- You have started using a new sending domain name or plan to for email
- You suspect that email is not getting to recipients or being opened
- You recently changed ESP or brought on a new one
- You have found your IP or domain on a blocklist
- You are seeing lots of bounced or non-delivered email
- Your email seems to take a very long time to get delivered
- You’ve never had an email deliverability audit
What should your audit include?
An email deliverability audit is a truly comprehensive analysis of your email marketing program. It evaluates your organization’s current email marketing efforts. It reviews the processes, procedures, and systems associated with email deployment and helps you determine where improvements can be made.
Your technical configuration should be reviewed, of course, including essential aspects like email authentication.
Email authentication, for the layperson, is the process by which an email sender proves that they are able to send email from their domain. Authentication allows email recipients to trust in the validity of a message and ensure that it is not spam.
However, a thorough audit will evaluate much more than this including your typical email message content, email templates, content structure, content quality, email deployment, email list quality, recipient engagement, and recipient data.
At Email Industries, for example, we rely on our own evaluation tool, data sets, and experience alongside enhancing our visibility into your deliverability with third-party tools and data sets including Google’s Postmaster Tools, Microsoft SNDS, your ESP’s bounce logs, meaningful blocklists, and inbox placement tests.
Your audit vendor should be able to dive into your recipient data and help uncover dormant accounts, misclassified bounces, and other risky practices in your program or infrastructure. Truly great deliverability audits will also delve deep into your program analyzing things like subject lines, content, templates, the use of redirects, and more. Your program and processes around it will be analyzed including aspects like scheduling, timing, cadence, and other factors.
Here at Email Industries, we even offer a white-glove deliverability monitoring service. This offers you the assurance that your sending reputation is continuously monitored, protected, and optimized by our deliverability experts. However, it always starts with an email deliverability audit.
How long does an email delivery audit take?
A worthwhile audit doesn’t happen overnight. You should expect a week or more invested in auditing your program and infrastructure and another week to generate meaningful reports and recommendations. This will provide a baseline.
A good audit will include prioritized recommendations, ongoing monitoring of your deliverability, and white-glove support in the implementation of the recommendations.
A great email deliverability audit will be performed on your sales and marketing infrastructure, primary corporate email infrastructure, setup, and a view of all your sending tools, services, and domains.
How often should an email audit be done?
This will depend on the size of your organization, its list, and the complexities of your email program. If email is a primary driver for your business it is fair to say you will want to be auditing your deliverability every 12 to 18 months.
You will also want to consider implementing an audit right away if you see any level of sustained negative ROI in your email marketing efforts when you look to implement a major new email program or solution and at other key times when your level of email usage and maturity grows.
Want to receive an estimate for an audit?
The scope of an email deliverability audit is most often tied to the number of domains and sending tools you use as well as the complexity of your email stack, therefore fees vary.
We have 20 years of experience fixing every sort of deliverability problem, and we’d be happy to help you with your email deliverability audit. Schedule a discovery call to receive a custom proposal. 👋
Founder and CEO of Email Industries