• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, Yesterday

Too many marketers see email deliverability as an art when they should be approaching it as a science.

Almost 20% of permission-based emails never reach the inbox, and the only way to reverse this is to do a thorough audit, according to Email Deliverability Audit: How to Troubleshoot and Fix Your Email Delivery, a paper recently released by Litmus.

“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,” the paper notes.   

A 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.” 

Of course, Litmus is all for outsourcing this task since it performs such audits itself. But you can also do it yourself.  

First, you should check engagement metrics like read time, open rates, and click rates. Then double-check these elements: 

• Sending domain 
• Authentication protocols 
• IP and sender reputation
• Blocklists and spam filters
• Spam traps and list validation 
• Email content 
• Delivery issues: Bounce rates 
• Unsubscribe and spam complaints

Next, run deliverability tests to determine what you’re doing well — and what you are not.  

What do you do with this information? Prioritize the needed fixes.  

“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,” the paper concludes. “Implement these insights in every new email, test your emails thoroughly before sending, and iterate on changes to achieve meaningful results.”

Confused by this terminology? Deliverability is a measure of how often your email makes it to your subscriber’s inbox and does not end up in the spam folder. It is separate from delivery, a technical issue where “your email doesn’t get to the subscriber at all.”