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Key takeaways ✨
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We send email campaigns to prompt recipients to take a specific action—to start using a new feature in our app, register for a webinar, or make a purchase from our online store.
But if our subscribers never see it? That’s just wasted effort.
That’s why it’s crucial to track the performance of your campaigns and find both technical and marketing ways to improve the results.
An email deliverability audit is an effective technical method to increase the open rate. Because deliverability has so many moving parts, it’s important to examine each major element—infrastructure, content, and sender reputation—to determine what’s causing the issue and how to fix it.
Table of contents
Signs you have email deliverability issues
When we asked email marketers their key priorities for our annual State of Email Survey, monitoring their deliverability rates hit the top five. Yet, 22% of email geeks who took our survey admitted they don’t measure their email deliverability rate for their email marketing campaigns, or aren’t sure if they do.
That makes it difficult to know if you have a problem in the first place.
How do you know if you’re having a deliverability problem? On average, almost 20% of permission-based emails never reach consumers’ inboxes because they are filtered as spam or junk.
Deliverability is a measure of how often your email makes it to your subscriber’s inbox, versus filtered into spam, junk, or wherever else emails go to languish unread. (This is opposed to delivery, which is a fundamental technical issue where your email doesn’t get to the subscriber at all. If you suspect there’s something deeper happening here, check your bounce rates.)
Increasing spam complaints
If you suspect you have a deliverability problem, the first place to look is your spam complaints. You can fiddle with your email design and copy all you’d like, but if your subscribers mark you as spam, you’re going to end up in the spam folder.
Why would someone mark your email as spam if you’re obviously legit? When we asked consumers for our State of Email survey, 78% of the participants said they mark an email as spam if the email “looks like spam.” 🙄
There’s not much you can do about that—though maybe lay off FuNkY typing or references to FREEFREEFREE items—but you can (and should) make it easy for your subscribers to feel heard and seen by your emails. That’s because 54% of respondents from the same survey stated they report a message as spam if the sender didn’t ask permission to email them, while 49% will submit a spam complaint if the email doesn’t give them a way to unsubscribe.
That means you need to make it clear why you’re sending the email (we’re going to assume you didn’t buy a list out of the blue. Please, please don’t do that!) and make sure the unsubscribe link is clearly posted somewhere in the email.
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What is an email deliverability audit?
If you suspect that you’ve got an email deliverability issue, it’s time for an email deliverability audit. An email deliverability audit is a systematic process of evaluating all of the elements of your email marketing program to determine what is making your emails land in the spam folder and how to fix them.
“What we focus on is our inbox placement. We want 100% of our emails getting to the inbox, and if it drops below 90%, we’re going to immediately investigate what’s going on. Deliverability is a measure of the health of your email marketing program, so it’s important to do regular check-ups on your domain, IP, and authentication in particular to make sure you’re up-to-date, just like how we all go to the doctor each year.“
Carin Slater
Email Marketing Expert
DIY or outsource: who should do the audit?
A deliverability audit is a complex process with a variety of ins and outs. Therefore, the first question is whether you should hire an expert or do it yourself (DIY).
In general, if you have a large volume of messages and a sophisticated email workflow, it’s recommended to outsource the audit. However, expert help can also come in handy for smaller teams to get insights into their email sending processes.
Here are the pros and cons of an outsourced vs. in-house email deliverability audit:
| Hiring an Expert | In-house Audit | |
|---|---|---|
| Pros |
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| Cons |
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Usually, the full audit is performed for a single isolated campaign to avoid judging based on average score of all campaigns because deliverability depends on a whole list of factors:
- Technical setup (SMTP server, IP, email authentication, etc.)
- Email content (and no, I don’t mean spam trigger words)
- Contact list—are you using problematic acquisition sources?
- Sender’s behavior (how often you send emails, how you segment your recipients, etc.)
When performed by a deliverability expert, an audit typically takes up to two weeks. You should receive a report that describes tests that were run and issues found, with a list of tools and screenshots, as well as recommendations on how you can increase your email deliverability. But you won’t know if any of it will actually help or not until you put the report to use, after your contract with the expert has ended.
If you decide to hire an expert, you can start by checking with your email sending provider to see if they offer this kind of service. There are also companies that offer both deliverability testing tools and consulting services. Alternatively, you can search for consultants on Upwork, LinkedIn, or Reddit communities. Follow your needs, reviews from real clients, the structure of an offer, and results guarantee.
How to perform an email deliverability audit
But you don’t need an expert to conduct an audit every time. It’s something you should be thinking about regularly. In fact, marketers who describe their email programs as successful are 22% more likely than those at less successful ones to monitor their deliverability or inbox placement.
You can make an audit yourself, using the same tools and approaches, but you will need to interpret the results and create an implementation plan yourself. You should be keeping an ongoing watch over your email deliverability and making adjustments as you go along. While deliverability can be a challenging topic to wrap your head around, it’s a crucial element of email marketing—and luckily, we’re here to help!
Here’s how to approach your own email deliverability audit, using Litmus as a starting point.
1. Define your goals
Specify what you expect from the audit. Do you already know your deliverability issues and need guidelines on how to fix them? Do you have doubts about the reliability of your sending infrastructure? Or do you just watch the low open rate and want to find a way to improve it?
Start in your email service provider (ESP) and your Litmus Analytics dashboard. This is where you can see your engagement metrics over time, like read time, open rates, and click rates, which can indicate if you’re having a deliverability issue or not.
2. Select metrics and the tools to assess them
Litmus runs a comprehensive suite of checks to validate your authentication records and check blocklists, as well as work on specific emails before you hit send.
Take a look at each of the elements of email deliverability to determine if there’s an issue. That means evaluating your sending domain, authentication, IP and reputation, blocklist and spam check, email content, and list validation. There are also free tools out there, like Google Postmaster Tools, that make it easy to see how your emails are performing and where you stand in addition to your Litmus tests.
| Email Deliverability Checklist | |
|---|---|
| Sending domain | Spam traps and list validation |
| Authentication protocols | Email content |
| IP and sender reputation | Delivery issue: Bounce rates |
| Blocklists and spam filters | Unsubscribe and spam complaints |
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3. Run your deliverability tests
Now you’re ready to do the actual audit! Pause any automated or transactional emails if you can, and tell your sales team to cool it on the cold emails for a minute, until the audit is complete.
Evaluate each of the deliverability elements and metrics you’d like to measure according to your checklist and add the results. What are you doing well? What needs improvement? Litmus Spam Filter Testing should give you an idea of what’s considered good or bad per email and overall for your email marketing program.
4. Prioritize needed fixes
So, your results show you’ve got quite a few things you can improve. What now? Start with the musts—the most important issues that can bring the most valuable results. Then collect low-hanging fruits, and make fixes that are easy and fast to implement.
An impact-effort or action priority matrix is a great way to visualize your quick wins, major projects, and what may not be worth the effort.
Source: Mind Tools
5. Prepare the implementation plan
Create an action plan that contains the needed fixes, ways of applying them, who’s responsible for them, and deadlines. A good email remediation plan not only helps you cool the burn but also ensures deliverability success moving forward.
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Litmus Spam Filter Testing won’t leave you hanging when it comes to your email deliverability metrics. In addition to over 40+ spam filter tests, you’ll also see personalized action items so you know exactly what to do to fix any deliverability issues you find, whether that’s for your next email send or adding double opt-in for your email list acquisition.
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How to fix your deliverability issues
This could happen to anyone. In June 2022, we experienced an issue with our email reputation as we noticed our inbox placement rate had gone from 98-99% to less than 90%.
That doesn’t seem like much, but it threw us into a panic. And we were right to do so—turns out we had some major deliverability issues that we had missed. Cue the audit!
Now, here’s how to fix…
- Poor authentication protocols
- Sending to invalid email addresses
- Irregular email sending patterns
- Lack of list segmentation and personalization
Poor authentication protocols
There are four different email authentication protocols to choose from for your email authentication setup. We recommend doing all of them.
- Sender Policy Framework (SPF) shows which IP addresses or domains that can send mail on your behalf via a DNS TXT entry. SPF tells mailbox providers that if it’s sent from your company’s domain or IP address, it’s from you.
- DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM): DKIM matches a public and private key, like a digital signature, to associate a given email message with your organization as part of the authentication process.
- Domain Message Authentication and Reporting Conformance (DMARC): DMARC defines how receiving inbox providers should handle messages that fail an authentication check. They can either do nothing, quarantine the email, or reject it. We strongly recommend you set your DMARC to p=reject. This is the best protection against phishing and spoofing attempts for your brand and signals that you’re trustworthy to mailbox providers.
Having these set up correctly is absolutely necessary for your deliverability.
Sending to invalid or inactive email addresses
To fix this, you’ll need to remove any invalid or inactive email addresses from your email list. You should clean your email list regularly, including filtering out common typos (like gmial.com or yaho.com) or any email addresses that have bounced. Unverified email addresses are a risk for your deliverability, which is why it’s important to conduct email list cleaning on a regular basis.
This impacts your deliverability because it shows ISPs that you don’t have great email list hygiene—that is, you’re sending to subscribers who have stopped interacting with your emails, and therefore don’t want to hear from you anymore.
First, set up a re-engagement campaign for any subscriber who hasn’t touched one of your emails in 60 or 90 days. If they don’t engage with it, say goodbye to them for good.
Once you’ve done that, it’s a good idea to set up double opt-in practices for your list acquisition. Double opt-in, as opposed to single opt-in, requires any new subscriber to manually validate their email address before they receive emails from you. Yes, it adds a little bit of friction. But what you trade in numbers you gain in engagement. These subscribers actually want to hear from you.
Irregular email sending patterns
Sometimes, the problem is with your email frequency. Sending too many emails at once gets you straight in someone’s junk folder. It’s better to set a consistent email marketing cadence so your subscribers know what to expect. That way, you also avoid subscriber fatigue.
Ask yourself:
- Is the volume of emails too high or inconsistent?
- Am I sending emails to people who have unsubscribed or show no engagement?
- What kind of automations do I have set up, and are they necessary?
- Have I landed on a blacklist or blocklist?
“There’s this expectation that you always need to send an email,” says email expert Tracie Pang. “But if you’re continuing to send emails without engagement, it’s going to affect your sender reputation. Sending to your list multiple days in a row like that could lead to more than one spam complaint because they’re tired of hearing from you.”
Lack of list segmentation and personalization
This can also be because you’re sending to your entire list, every time. Instead, think about separating your email list based on their preferences, or list segmentation. Some of your subscribers may only want to hear about your shoes, for example, instead of shoes, clothes, and accessories. The best way to figure that out is to ask:
The key to better deliverability is showing ISPs that your subscribers want to receive your emails. The best way to look legitimate, in their eyes, is to have high engagement—opens, clicks, replies, and so on. One of the best ways to do that is through personalized emails. In fact, 75% percent of consumers say personalization is important, while 81% are more likely to open an email focused on their interests than one that merely includes their first name.
Maintain great deliverability with email best practices
Like most things with email marketing, deliverability is not a one-and-done situation. In the same way that you must regularly check up on your automated emails, templates, or merge tags, you should be monitoring your deliverability regularly. This doesn’t mean you need to do a full-blown audit every quarter.
Deliverability falls into three categories: Infrastructure, content, and sender reputation. You can pull levers to help improve each one. Here are a few email deliverability best practices that can also help you improve your email performance—a big factor in getting your emails delivered to the inbox.
1. Infrastructure
Infrastructure refers to several different technical elements, but the most important for you to get right is your authentication protocols. Setting these up verifies to ISPs that you and your emails are legitimate senders and should not be marked as spam. On a regular basis, you should be checking your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to make sure something hasn’t gotten funky.
To comply with email regulations from Gmail and Yahoo, you need to complete SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. But there’s also one more authentication protocol you can add: Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI). This is optional, but strongly recommended because it’s an added layer of security and very few email marketers are using it right now—only 8% of email geeks we polled are doing it—making it a huge opportunity to establish more credibility and boost your open rates up to 21%.
2. Email content
The more elements you include in your message, the higher your chances of ending up in spam. But keep in mind the email clients your subscribers use and how those inbox providers may weigh different factors and filter emails. The idea of “spam-triggering words” has been debunked with how sophisticated mailbox providers have become.
In general, consider the following:
- Reduce the number of images and try to reach a live-text-to-image ratio of 70:30.
- Reduce HTML file size to keep email data being received from 15 KB to 100 KB.
- When you include a link, make sure it’s necessary. If you link every single thing in your email it can appear spammy, since that’s what scammers do to trick people into clicking a phishing link. It is recommended to have less than five, but you should test your email before sending it to check how links affect your sending reputation.
“There’s so much more that goes into it than just the words you use,” says Carin. “It’s important not to overuse spammy words, of course, but what really matters is that your subscribers want to receive the emails you’re sending. That they’re actively engaging with your content. If an ISP sees that nobody’s interacting with your emails, they’re going to say, ‘Nobody wants this. Must be spam.’”
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3. Sender reputation
All of this adds up to your sender reputation, which is an aggregate sender score that indicates to ISPs whether you’re a legitimate email sender. Your sending reputation depends on the email domain and IP address you’re sending emails from. It’s called the sender score and is measured from 0 to 100. The higher your score, the better your email reputation.
Your IP reputation also matters. If you’re on a dedicated IP address, you’ll have a much clearer image of your email-sending reputation. But if you’re on a shared IP address, your email sending reputation may be impacted by others on your shared IP.
A poor sender reputation is a cause for concern. Dig into our full guide on sender reputation here.
Make it to the inbox—not the spam folder
The most important part of an email deliverability audit is analyzing its results and implementing changes. The main goal is to increase email deliverability so that more people can receive, engage with, and convert from your emails.
In the end, you should clearly understand which aspects of your sending infrastructure, your behavior as a sender, and content details have the most impact on the email delivery and performance of your campaigns. Implement these insights in every new email, test your emails thoroughly before sending, and iterate on changes to achieve meaningful results.
If you performed an audit yourself and couldn’t find the reasons for bad email performance, it may make sense to seek an expert’s help. Sending emails is a difficult process, with many puzzling elements and dependencies. That’s why it requires constant checkups and improvements.
Good luck with your audit, and happy sending!
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