Email deliverability audit
Most audits hand you a report and leave you to work out what to do with it. Ours doesn’t. We review your authentication, sender reputation, list quality and sending behaviour, then fix what we find, as one engagement with one fixed fee agreed before we start.
The cost of email that never arrives
Every email that lands in spam instead of the inbox is revenue your business has already earned but never received. A customer signed up, made a purchase, or asked a question, and your business already did the work to earn that message a place in their inbox. When it lands in spam instead, or never arrives at all, that work is wasted and the revenue attached to it disappears quietly, with no error message and no alert on a dashboard.
For most businesses, the scale of this stays invisible until someone goes looking. A welcome email that never arrives means a new sign-up who never activates. A password reset stuck in spam means a support ticket instead of a self-service fix. A receipt or shipping confirmation filed under promotions means a customer who calls to ask where their order is. None of this shows up as a single dramatic failure. It shows up as a slow drift in the numbers that most teams attribute to something else entirely, usually the product or the marketing, when the real cause is sitting in the sending infrastructure underneath.
The problem with most audits
An audit that ends in a report is only half a service. You get a document telling you what’s wrong, then a second conversation to scope the fix, then a second procurement cycle to get it approved. Weeks pass. The problems the report identified are still costing you inbox placement while everyone waits for a proposal.
A checklist audit compounds the problem in a different way. It tells you whether a record exists, not whether it is actually protecting your sending, and it stops at the technical layer entirely, missing the sending behaviour, list quality and lifecycle problems that are usually where the real cost is hiding. Deliverability Review and Fix is built differently. The review and the fix are the same engagement. Findings don’t sit in a report waiting for someone to sign off on a follow-up project.
What the review investigates
A full email deliverability audit has to cover more ground than any single tool can reach. Ours investigates three layers, because a problem in one is often caused by something happening in another.
Authentication and infrastructure
- SPF, DKIM, DMARC and BIMI records and configuration, checked for alignment rather than just existence
- Sending domain and IP setup and history
- The schema markup and structured data behind transactional and marketing sends, which affects how confidently inbox providers can verify what a message actually is
Sender reputation and sending behaviour
- Domain and IP reputation and history across major inbox providers
- Sending behaviour, cadence and volume patterns over time
- List quality, suppression logic and bounce handling
- Status across major blocklist providers
Engagement and lifecycle design
- Engagement patterns and segmentation health
- Lifecycle trigger design across real user journeys
- How your different sending streams, marketing, transactional and lifecycle, interact with each other rather than being reviewed in isolation
Findings across all three layers are prioritised by the impact they are having on inbox placement and revenue, not by how easy they are to fix.
What you get
A full written review within 3 to 5 business days of receiving access and information, covering everything above and explained in plain English rather than left as an unexplained score.
Quick fixes implemented across a 45-day window.Authentication corrections, infrastructure realignment, list hygiene and suppression work, and configuration changes, the changes that don’t depend on longer-term strategic work, delivered through a weekly 45 to 60 minute working session where we talk through progress and agree what happens next. You have direct email access to your assigned deliverability specialist throughout, not a ticketing queue.
Seed testing at the start of the review and again at close, to see how messages are landing across major providers. Seed testing is useful, but it is one data point among several rather than proof on its own, so we read it alongside authentication status, reputation trends and engagement data rather than treating a single clean result as the final word.
A clear plan for anything longer-term, set out in the report, that you can either action yourselves or carry into Ongoing Monitoring, where we implement it as part of the retainer.
A fixed fee, scoped and confirmed before work begins, so the cost is settled before the findings land rather than negotiated after the fact. We implement what we find ourselves, rather than handing the fixing over to someone else.
Built for UK senders
Most audits available to UK businesses are either automated tool reports with no human judgement behind them, or US-built services designed for US inbox behaviour and US working hours. We’re UK-based, operate on UK working hours, and understand the parts of this that don’t translate from a generic playbook: UK GDPR as it applies to your list, the weight Microsoft 365 carries in UK B2B inboxes, and Consumer Duty where it’s relevant to regulated senders.
Who this is for
This is built for any business where email is a meaningful part of how you acquire, onboard or retain customers, regardless of sector. SaaS platforms where a welcome or verification email decides whether a trial activates, e-commerce and subscription businesses where a receipt or shipping update lands at the moment a customer is most likely to buy again, and FinTech businesses where a failed transactional email carries Consumer Duty implications alongside the commercial ones.
It is not built for cold outbound senders, and we do not work with lists built from purchased or scraped data. If your sending relies on either, the underlying problem is not one a Deliverability Review and Fix can solve, because the reputation damage is coming from how the list was built rather than from your infrastructure or content.
What clients say
James brought our domain reputation into a genuinely healthy place, with a direct impact on our open rates and click-to-open rates. Every step was transparent and proving ROI was straightforward. Highly recommended.
The health check report was well-received by our SLT. James was very knowledgeable and the whole process ran smoothly. Would recommend.
I would recommend Digistrat to anyone dealing with deliverability issues or looking to upskill their team. James went above and beyond to make sure I understood every finding and what steps were needed to fix them.
Still working out if this is the right fit?
If you want to understand exactly what a review like this looks at before you book one, read what we check and why. If you’ve got one specific question rather than a full programme to review, an advisory session might be the better starting point.
FAQs about the email deliverability audit
How is this different from a free online deliverability checker?
Free tools check specific technical records and return a pass or fail against a standard. That is a useful starting point but a narrow one. Our review looks at what those records mean in the context of how your programme actually sends, then investigates sender reputation, sending behaviour, list quality and lifecycle design, the layers a free tool cannot reach, and turns the findings into fixes rather than a score.
Do you just hand over a report, or do you fix things too?
We fix things. The review and the fix are the same engagement. Quick fixes are implemented across the 45-day window that follows the report, and anything longer-term is set out clearly so you can action it yourselves or carry it into Ongoing Monitoring.
What access do you need to run the review?
Read-only access to your ESP account helps significantly, since it lets us review sending patterns, suppression logic and configuration that are not visible from outside. We confirm exactly what we need before the engagement begins and work with whatever level of access you are comfortable providing.
How reliable is seed testing on its own?
Useful, but not conclusive on its own. A seed test shows where a message landed for a small set of test addresses at one moment in time. We run it at the start of the review and again at close, and read it alongside authentication status, reputation trends and real engagement data rather than treating one clean result as proof the work is done.
Do you work with cold outbound senders or purchased lists?
No. We do not work with cold outbound sending or lists built from purchased or scraped data. The review is built for businesses sending to people who have a genuine relationship with them, where the causes of poor deliverability are fixable rather than structural.
What happens after the 45-day window?
Anything that depends on longer-term strategic work, list rebuilding, sending architecture changes, a phased authentication rollout, is set out in the report with a clear plan. You can action it with your own team, bring in another supplier, or continue with us through Ongoing Monitoring.
Book a free check-up
15 minutes, no obligation. We’ll talk through what’s happening with your email and whether a full review and fix makes sense.