How to Take Control of Your Sender Reputation and Email Deliverability with an Email Deliverability Audit
Sending out messages without being certain of their getting into target inboxes doesn’t make any sense. Making sure that your customers get your emails is the entire point of solid sender reputation and high email deliverability. That’s why it is essential to get to know how to run an email deliverability audit of your sender reputation. It can provide an insight into the place where your messages are going to land. This article focuses on essential aspects of an audit and how to implement them.
What Is to Be Understood by Email Deliverability Audit?
An email deliverability audit is considered to be a set of measures which target at pinpointing where emails land and analyzing factors which affect email deliverability. Everybody who is involved in email marketing should consider performing an audit since it can give the information of whether or not your messages are reaching your customers. If the result of an audit is a low performance, you will find out why your open rates are low and your messages fall into spam folders.
The Significance of an Email Audit and The Role of a Mail Checker
Before launching an email campaign, marketers spend hours creating perfect messages, studying their target audience and concentrating on proper leads, gathering their contact details, etc. However, results may be unintended since your messages are rarely opened. To find out the causes for it, email deliverability audit is essential. By performing an audit, you can locate possible challenges connected with email deliverability, such as:
- Problems with email infrastructure;
- Poor reputation;
- Getting on a blacklist;
- Failed email authentication, etc.
Creating a marketing list is an important aspect of the preliminary stage of an email campaign. When a company focuses on making a list, it’s necessary to care about its hygiene. To keep it clean and get rid of spam traps and invalid addresses, one can make use of a mail checker. It’s a kind of tool whose goal is to verify available email addresses. Before sending out messages, it is crucial to utilize a checker to validate email addresses on your list to prevent bounces and spam, and therefore protect reputation.
What Is the Estimated Time of Performing an Email Audit?
Running an email audit doesn’t usually take much time, even if we talk about a large business which sends out a large number of messages. Nevertheless, if serious problems are detected in the process of the audit, it can take up to a month to solve them. So it varies from case to case.
It’s also possible to save your time by outsourcing this part of your work. If your email volume is large, it’s better to address professionals. Except from saved time, you are supposed to get a more profound analysis of your sending reputation and email deliverability as well as useful tips. But remember that it may be costly. The choice of the contractor is up to you. However, an email deliverability audit is, without any doubt, worth doing.
Clues about How to Perform an Audit of Email Sending Reputation
If you make up your mind to conduct an audit of your sending reputation by yourself, it’s high time to make sense of its fundamentals and get the hang of this.
Email deliverability audit involves four core components which should be taken into account while auditing:
- Technical setup. This includes domain, email setup, authentication protocols, etc.
- Reputation. The way you send messages, bounce rates, and spam complaints are assessed while auditing reputation.
- Email deliverability. Its goal is to determine where messages land.
- Quality of content. This helps to find out whether your messages are worth opening, clicking and replying.
Monitor Your Email Service Provider
The most essential thing to be checked is how the messages have been performing up to now. To put it another way, you need to find out whether emails have fallen into inbox or spam folders. Bear in mind that high open rate is impossible without proper delivery. And you can’t expect a high reply rate, if your messages aren’t opened. When you want to locate where your messages land, it’s possible to send test emails using online tools.
Make Use of an Email Spam Checker
Blacklists, which contain IP addresses and domain names related to spam, are dangerous for email senders and may have an adverse effect on their reputation. Your email deliverability is considered to be hurt when you appear on a blacklist. If you want to check your presence on a blacklist, you can leverage an email spam checker. Moreover, it’s quite laborious to vanish from such a list but possible. That’s why it’s necessary to beware of getting into a blacklist and keep an eye on it with an email spam checker tool. If it occurs, make an effort to fix it as fast as possible.
Keep Record of Your Sender score
A sender score is used to measure your sending reputation by an ISP. The higher your score, the better reputation you have. It’s possible to leverage an email spam score checker, a kind of tool which checks your sender score. Maximum result may be 100. Be mindful that the score is influenced by the way your recipients treat your messages.
Set up a Custom Tracking Domain
Since it helps to take control of your deliverability, it’s better to possess your own domain in the long run. When you launch a cold email campaign, you want to know for sure how many recipients open and click your messages, and reply to them. The perfect way to get this data is to leverage a custom tracking domain.
Your own domain or subdomain which is used only to monitor opens and clicks in your emails is known as a custom tracking domain. Its advantages are numerous:
- maintain your sender reputation;
- boost deliverability;
- enhance click-through rates.
Set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC
To set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC, it’s necessary to have access to DNS which is a storage of domain names and related IP addresses. These records ensure the safety of internet users.
- SPF covers information about servers which are authorized to send messages from a particular domain. Setting an SPF helps to avoid spoofing. One SPF record corresponds to only one domain. Nevertheless, several servers and IP addresses may be mentioned within an SPF record Google acknowledges.
- DKIM is used to prove that the email belongs to a particular company. DKIM provides the header of your message with a digital signature. It helps to locate fake addresses, forestall spoofing, and struggle against spam.
- DMARC coordinates SPF and DKIM records. DMARC determines possible actions of the recipient’s mail server if incoming messages haven’t passed the authentication check (SPF and DKIM). This record is utilized by companies to protect their domains from illegal use.
Be Careful When You Send Cold Emails
When you send out cold emails, it’s reasonable to avoid several mistakes: send plenty of messages at a time, create frankly spammy and non-unique content, and ignore reply rates with high sending volumes. Such mistakes may alert email providers and you can be regarded as a spammer. Of course, to save your efforts, you can make use of cold email templates to create your messages. But remember to make them top-quality and personalized enough to attract recipients.
Pay Attention to the Quality of Your Marketing List
If you’re involved in cold email campaigns, it’s necessary to create a list of your target audience and take care of it. Make up your list thoroughly and try to add an audience which may be interested in your messages. Don’t purchase ready-made lists. While some addresses are irrelevant on your list, you are supposed to have high bounce rates which affect your deliverability and reputation. Don’t neglect using email verifiers to validate addresses on your list.
Main Points
An email deliverability audit is an indispensable part of a cold email campaign. To ensure your messages hit the recipient’s inbox, some checks should be done and some tools should be utilized. In this piece of writing we have discussed:
- What an email deliverability audit means, its importance, approximate terms;
- Tips on how to do an audit of your sender reputation and email deliverability;
- Features which should be considered while auditing.