Are you noticing something wrong with email deliverability? Maybe a higher bounce rate or unexpected drop in engagement. Or someone has notified you about the landing of your messages in spam. Whatever the issue is, you need to fix it as soon as possible. For this, you need to conduct a comprehensive email deliverability audit. If you need guidance about the deliverability audit, don’t worry; you are in the right place.
What Is An Email Deliverability Audit?
An email deliverability audit is a procedure to analyze all those elements that can affect deliverability. The audit will measure the deliverability rates, determine where email messages are delivered, and identify those factors that may reduce the deliverability rates.
Factors that affect the deliverability are:
- Email Infrastructure
- Failed email authentication
- Poor sender reputation or email warmup service
- blocked from receiving emails
- Inappropriate contact acquisition efforts
- Spam signals in email content
What Is An Email Deliverability Test?
An email deliverability test analyzes all the processes an email goes through to get from the sender to the receiver. Before starting the audit, there are manuals and tools to check email deliverability. They are the initial tests that help you to determine those factors you need to focus on in the audit. The following factors are analyzed in this test:
- Identifying which type of email is best for your audience can result in a high email open rate and increase sales.
- Checking the tone of communication and quality of words in the content. Spamming words may affect the deliverability of your emails.
- Checking the results of attached visuals and links and how customers respond to them.
- Checking the reputation of your IP and domain
- Checking whether you are in any spam or blocklist
- Checking the authentication records
These factors are mostly analyzed using some tools, and the results will help you in the audit. These tests determine the direction of the audit. The results help you in which direction you should conduct the email audit.
How To Perform Email Deliverability Testing
Email deliverability testing is performed manually and by using some tools. For example, you can do email delivery test by mailing to yourself to check where the email lands. You can also click on “Show Original” in Gmail, where you can quickly determine if the mail is passed DKIM, SPF, and DMARC authentication. Furthermore, some testing tools can help you test your email’s deliverability.
These testing tools include:
- Inbox placement rate: The ratio of emails delivered to the inbox, not to the spam or junk folder. The percentage can be calculated by dividing the number of delivered emails to the inbox by the total number of sent emails.
- Email on Acid: deliverability features on Email on Acid can check whether your IP address is in a block list. It also runs a pass/fails test against major spam filters.
- MXToolbox: this is a comprehensive tool with some useful features such as blocklist check, the reputation of your IP & domain, and checking email health.
- Mail-Tester.com: This free tool can protect your reputation and provide you an email warmup service by detecting unwanted and bounced emails and verifying the most difficult email addresses.
- Mailreach: this tool improves the tone of communication and the quality of mail by detecting and removing spam words.
Folderly: A Comprehensive Email Deliverability Testing Tool
Folderly is one tool to improve the performance of your email. , Folderly is a comprehensive email deliverability testing tool that can analyze all the deliverability factors and boost your email performance. Rather than multiple tools to analyze different factors in an email deliverability test Folderly is a far better tool. This AI-powered platform locates, solves, and prevents email durability pitfalls from ensuring that your email reaches the receiver’s inbox.
Over 51% of business emails can never land in the inbox. A large number of emails in the spam folder affects your budget and deprive you of sell opportunity.
How To Collect Information For Comprehensive An Email Deliverability Audit
Many factors can affect the deliverability of email. You should collect detailed information about the factors affecting deliverability. Even in some situations, if you are aware of a factor affecting an email’s deliverability, you should follow the proper procedure of email deliverability audit. Conducting an audit can reveal other ways to improve delivery.
- Email Infrastructure: Components that deliver emails such as hardware, software
- Email delivery rates: Percentage of emails landed in mailboxes.
- Sender reputation: Reputation of your IP and domain
- Email content: individual email information about Potential spam signals, spam complaints, and bounce rates
- Email authentication protocols: collecting DNS txt records.
Check Email Delivery Rates
Email delivery rate is one of the most important factors in the success of email marketing. Overall, the email delivery rate also includes email deliverability. the email Delivery rate tells you about the percentage of successfully delivered emails. Email delivery rate is the percentage of emails that are landed in mailboxes.
You can calculate the percentage of delivery ra by dividing the number of delivered emails to the inbox by the total number of sent emails. Deliverability is about where the mail ends up. The mail with no authentication failure, such as bounced, spammed, or rejected, is considered delivered.
Explore your email infrastructure
Exploring your email infrastructure is a very tricky part. The main goal of exploring the email infrastructure is to determine whether you are using the right setup to send and receive emails—a good email structure guarantees a great deliverability and email open rate. The basic structure of email includes hardware and software that allows you to send and receive emails. The structure also includes the sending domains, SMTP ports, IP addresses, and mail transfer agents.
SMTP Ports
It is a simple mail transfer protocol. These ports communicate with receiving mail servers such as IMAP and POP3. The two most commonly used SMTP ports are port 25 and port 587. Most emails are sent through port 25, but this port also has a high spam rate. It is a primary method for SMTP but only if you are managing your mail servers by yourself.
Port 587 is recommended with TLS encryption. This port ensures that the email is delivered securely.
IP Addresses
You should use a dedicated IP for sending emails. If you are sending emails through shared IP, it can hurt your deliverability. Switching to a dedicated IP can improve your email deliverability.
Sending Domains
In addition to the main web hosting domain, high-volume email senders usually use subdomains to send the emails. You can also use separate subdomains for marketing and transactional emails.
Making Email Deliverability Improvements
After completing the audit, you should be clear about where the improvement is required
- Email durability tests; will highlight any glaring issue
- Find the overall email delivery rate; a 95% email delivery rate is ideal
- Review your email infrastructure, and see if any improvements are needed.
- Ensure email authentication such as SPF, DKIM, DMARC
- Have a look at sender’s reputation, whether you are in any blocklist
- Examine your email content to remove suspicious or spam content.
The email deliverability audit report will help you to take action for improvements. It will help prioritize the items and assign the work to responsible persons.
Conclusion
An email deliverability audit is a procedure to analyze those factors that can affect the deliverability of emails. The audit measures the deliverability rates to determine where email messages are being delivered and identify those factors that may reduce the deliverability rates. This deliverability audit report will be helpful for you in taking action to improve the email deliverability percentage. It will be helpful in achieving a good email open rate.
