How to Do an Email Deliverability Audit: Step-by-Step Process

Did you know that almost 46% of all emails sent every day are marked as spam?

If you’re thinking: What if, one day, my email ends up in the spam folder as well?

I, too, used to get anxious after hitting the send button, wondering if my emails reached my recipients’ inboxes or if they landed somewhere else.

But those days are no more… Now, I know exactly how to monitor and audit my email deliverability.

In this guide, I’ll show how you can perform an email deliverability audit so that you can take proactive steps to keep your emails out of the spam folder.

So, let’s get started!

Email Deliverability Audit – Table of Contents

• What is an Email Deliverability Audit?
• How to Perform an Email Deliverability Audit?
• When Should You Conduct an Email Deliverability Audit?
• What Tools Can You Use to Conduct an Email Deliverability Audit?
• Fix Your Outreach and Start Scaling!
• Email Deliverability Audit: FAQs

What is an Email Deliverability Audit?

An email deliverability audit is like a health check-up of your entire cold email system.

Why you should do an audit?

It helps you find issues that can be stopping your emails from reaching their destination–your recipients’ inboxes–and fix them.

What are the factors you should check when doing an audit?

You should check each and every aspect of your cold email strategy when doing an audit—entire cold email infrastructure, engagement metrics, content, email list hygiene, etc.

I have covered more about this in the next section in full detail, so read on!

How to Perform an Email Deliverability Audit?

Now that you know what an email deliverability audit is and why you need one, let me show you how to do it the right way.

Yes, the right way!

You should check your email security setup, reputation, deliverability, and content quality.

I have covered all this in my 7-step process to perform a deliverability audit:

1. Measure Inbox Placement Rate (Deliverability)
2. Verify Your Authentications (SPF, DKIM, DMARC)
3. Check Your IP, Domain, and Sender Reputation
4. Check if You Have Been Blacklisted
5. Check Spam Rate, Unsubscribe Rate, And Bounce Rate
6. Review Your Email Content
7. Clean Your Email List

1. Measure Inbox Placement Rate (Deliverability)

The first step is to check if your emails are actually landing where they should—in inboxes—not in the spam folder or the promotions tab.

Based on your placement rate, you can decide if you need a complete audit or not.

There are 2 ways to check inbox placement, and I will discuss both methods:

1. Using Email Deliverability Tools
2. Manual Testing

Using Email Deliverability Tools

If you ask for my recommendation, I would suggest you rely on email deliverability tools that are specifically built for this purpose.

The time and effort you save will be worth the money spent (which is not a lot).

Here’s how they work 👇

1. These platforms typically provide a list of email addresses from various email service providers like Gmail, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc.
2. You’ll have to send your emails to these test addresses, just like you would to your regular recipients.
3. The tool then tracks where your emails land – Inbox, Promotions tab, Spam folder, or not delivered.
4. You will then get a detailed report showing your placement rate across all major ESPs.

It’s that simple!

You hardly have to do anything.

Next, I’ll show you the manual method, which is free but takes quite a bit of effort.

Manual Testing

If you want a free-of-cost method to monitor your inbox placement rate, this method is perfect for you.

You just need to replicate the entire automated process I talked about in the “Using Email Deliverability Tools” section.

Now, you get why I suggest using email deliverability monitoring tools–they do all this automatically and save a lot of time and effort.

Pro Tip: If you are running your email campaigns using just 2 to 4 accounts, then the manual method would be manageable for you.

For anything more than that, you should go for email deliverability monitoring tools.

Based on your report, you can decide if you need to run a complete audit.

If you do need to run one, then the next step is to verify your security setup.

2. Verify Your Authentication Infrastructure (SPF, DKIM, DMARC)

A secure authentication infrastructure is critical to maintaining high email deliverability. 

The reason behind this is simple: ESPs use these protocols to verify if your emails are genuinely from you.

If ESPs can’t verify this, then they will mark your emails as spam and even block them.

You can check the status of your authentication protocols–SPF, DKIM, and DMARC directly in Saleshandy.

Another way you can do this is by manually checking if your protocols are done in the right way, which would be quite a hassle.

3. Check Your IP, Domain, and Sender Reputation

The next step after checking your authentication records is to examine your reputation.

There are three major metrics: IP, Domain, and Sender Reputation.

If their reputation is low or has dropped, then your email deliverability will be severely affected.

In that case, you’ll have to immediately start taking steps to improve your sender reputation.

Pro Tip: Regularly monitor your reputation. You can use Google Postmaster tools, which is a free and native tool provided by Google

4. Check if You Have Been Blacklisted

The next step is to check if your domains or IP has been blacklisted.

There are multiple databases of public blacklists that are curated by ESPs and security companies.

If you’re on one of them, there is no way to recover; best start all over again.

You can easily check if you’re on any domain or IP blacklist directly from Saleshandy.

If not you can use a tool like Mxtoolbox to check if you’re on any blacklist.

5. Check Spam Rate, Bounce Rate, And Unsubscribe Rate

One of the major reasons behind poor deliverability is high spam, bounce, and unsubscribe rates.

If these metrics are high, then ESPs take it that you’re just blasting unsolicited emails—in other words—spamming.

• Spam Rate – A percentage of emails that are marked as spam by your recipients.
• Bounce Rate – A Percentage of emails that are undelivered to your recipients.
• Unsubscribe Rate – Measures how many recipients opt out of receiving your emails.

Your spam rate and unsubscribe rate indicate that you are sending unwanted and irrelevant emails to your recipients.

Whereas bounce rates (especially hard bounces) show ESPs that that you are sending emails to invalid or outdated email addresses, which says you’re just spamming

If you have a cold email software like Saleshandy, you can track all relevant metrics like opens, replies, unsubscribes, etc., from a very visual and easy-to-understand dashboard.

Note: If you don’t want to face deliverability issues, I strongly recommend you keep your rates below the following benchmarks:

• Spam Rate: < 0.1%
• Bounce Rate: < 2%
• Unsubscribe Rate: < 0.5%

6. Review Your Email Content

If you want to understand why you’re spam and unsubscribe rates may be high, then you should check your email content.

At the end of the day, your email copy is what your recipients engage with, so make sure it’s delivering something that’s relevant and valuable.

This is the checklist I have to make sure my email content is perfect:

• Keep the subject line relevant and catchy, and also give a hint at what value you’ll provide.
• Avoid spammy words like “Free,” “Urgent,” or “Act Now” to stay out of the spam folder.
• Your main email content should be 100 to 120 words.
• If you’re sending cold emails, make sure not to include HTML script, links, and attachments–focus more on delivering value through plain text.
• Personalize your emails to increase engagement rates.
• Keep your call-to-actions (CTAs) simple, clear, and relevant to our goal.
• Lastly, end with a professional email sign-off to leave a good impression.

What I Recommend: A/B test each element of your email to find what resonates with your audience, then optimize your email content.

If you want a software that can help you with all these, then you should consider Saleshandy. It can help you personalize at scale while making sure you’re following the right cold email writing practices.

7. Clean Your Email List

Remember bounce rates?

This is how you reduce it—clean your email list to remove invalid or outdated emails.

Here’s how I keep my email list clean:

1. I buy my email list only from trusted B2B data vendors that follow a strict email verification process.
2. I also re-verify all email addresses to remove any invalid ones that could have made their way onto my list.

Always have 2 layers of security to stay on the safer side!!

If you’re looking to get accurate and verified email addresses of prospects for your cold outreach, you can check out Lead Finder.

It has a vast database of 700M+ professional contacts from 60M+ companies across the globe.

You can use the various search filters to narrow down and pinpoint prospects who exactly match your ICP and buyer persona.

That brings us to the end of my 7-step email deliverability audit process. Though it might seem like a tedious process, it is a must if you’re facing deliverability issues and want to fix them.

If you want to make the process simpler, there are various tools you can use. I will discuss them in the upcoming sections.

When Should You Conduct an Email Deliverability Audit?

With the seven steps we have discussed above, you’re ready to conduct your own email deliverability audit.

But there’s another important question we face: When exactly should you perform one?

In my experience, the best thing to do is to conduct an audit every 3-6 months.

Moreover, I’ve also found it extremely beneficial to conduct an audit before and after cold email campaigns.

Why?

It will help you find and fix any potential issues before launching the campaign. 

Meanwhile, conducting an audit after the campaign lets you see how your outreach affected deliverability metrics.

Pro Tip: If you notice a sudden drop in engagement, it’s a good idea to perform an audit immediately to identify and fix any issues.

What Tools Can You Use to Conduct an Email Deliverability Audit?

Manually doing an email deliverability audit is next to impossible.

You need the help of auditing tools.

Here are the 4 tools I’ve found to be extremely useful:

1. Saleshandy
2. Google Postmaster Tools
3. SendForensics
4. MailTester.com

1. Saleshandy

If you are into cold emailing, Saleshandy is the best platform that can help you avoid landing in spam and find what can be wrong with your setup.

This AI-assisted cold email automation platform comes with a full deliverability stack to help you improve your inbox placement.

Here’s what you get👇

First, a proactive checklist–Sequence Score that will verify if you’re following the best practices in the industry based on three factors:

• Email Account Health
• Your Sequnce Setup
• Email Writing

If you have a score of more than 90, then you can be sure your emails will land in primary inboxes.

Next is email warm-up.

Warm up is very important to improve your sender reputation, especially if you have new email accounts.

You can connect your accounts and directly warm them in Saleshandy (Saleshandy X TrulyInbox integration)

You can also check the various email deliverability factors of your email accounts like, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, Custom Domain Setup, Domain & IP Blacklist, MX Record, etc.

This will easily help you find and fix any technical issues with your email infrastructure that could be impacting your deliverability.

There’s so much more that you can do with Saleshandy. The best way to know is to take a free trial and test all the features.

2. Google Postmaster Tools

Google’s Postmaster Tools is Gmail’s native deliverability tool for checking important analytics associated with your email address. It helps you monitor your:

• Authentication protocols like SPF, DMARC, and DKIM
• Spam Rate
• Domain and IP Reputation
• Delivery errors, etc.

In other words, Google Postmaster Tools is an excellent, free-to-use tool that helps you visualize the basic metrics of your email infrastructure.

3. SendForensics

SendForensics is a great tool for conducting an end-to-end email deliverability audit. Here are some of its features that stood out to me:

• Deliverability Analysis: SendForensics automatically tests your email for spam content, HTML scripts, and other red flags.
• Reputation Dashboard: You can get a detailed overview of your sender and domain reputation.
• Blacklist Checker: Easily find out if your email is listed on any email spam blacklist.
• Client Previews: You can visualize how your emails will look in your recipient’s inbox.

The only drawback is that SendForensics charges $39/month (billed annually) for its basic subscription. Plus, it doesn’t provide any other features apart from email deliverability metrics.

However, if all you need are deliverability metrics, SendForensics is a great platform!

4. MailTester.com

The last tool on our list is MailTester.

It provides you with a host of deliverability metrics and features over and above basic analysis of email delivery. So, apart from helping you conduct an email audit, it also helps you: 

• Detect and remove duplicate/invalid email addresses from your email lists
• Search for Spam Trap emails in your email lists
• Remove hard bounces by running an SMTP check on recipient emails
• Verify bulk email lists

But that’s not all! MailTester also monitors email spam blacklists and inbox placement rates.

Its basic plan starts at $27/month (billed annually). However, like SendForensics, it doesn’t offer any outreach services.

Fix Your Outreach and Start Scaling!

And that’s it!

I have covered each and every aspect of an email deliverability audit: what it is, why you should audit, and how to do it.

In my opinion, you should always take a proactive approach and periodically conduct an email deliverability audit.

It’s the best way to keep your email ecosystem healthy and your deliverability high!

If you’re into cold emails, I suggest you check out Saleshandy. It has an in-built email deliverability stack and deliverability monitors, which ensures that you’re following the best email-sending practices!

And the best part?

You also get suggestions and corrective actions to improve it! Take the free trial. It might be the only deliverability tool you need.

Audit. Identify. Fix. Scale. Generate Leads!

Email Deliverability Audit: FAQs

1. Which is the best platform to conduct an email deliverability audit?

For cold emailing, Saleshandy will help you easily do an email deliverability audit. You can also take the help of tools like Google Postmaster Tools, Mxtoolbox, SendForensics, etc.

2. How much time does an email deliverability audit take?

The time required depends on the complexity of your email setup and the tools you use for testing. If it’s a basic test, it might take you anywhere between 2-3 hrs, but if it’s complex, it may take even a day.

3. What does an email deliverability audit checklist include?

Having conducted hundreds of email deliverability audits, I’ve seen that the most comprehensive email deliverability audits include the following tasks:

1. Monitoring the Inbox Placement Rate
2. Verifying the security protocols (SPF, DKIM, and DMARC)
3. Examining the IP, Domain, and Sender Reputation
4. Checking the Spam Rate + the Bounce Rate
5. Reviewing Your Email Content
6. Cleaning Your Email List
7. Checking Email Spam Blacklists

4. Can I perform an email deliverability audit without any technical expertise?

Absolutely!! Tools like Saleshandy and Google Postmaster tools are very direct and user-friendly. So you don’t need to have a strong tech background.