What is an email deliverability audit?
An email deliverability audit is a systematic review of your sender reputation, list health, authentication, and engagement metrics to find what's keeping your email out of the inbox. It's a diagnostic designed to locate the specific problem before you start fixing things.
The audit reads a handful of signals together:
- Delivery and bounce rates: whether receiving servers accept your mail, with hard bounces (inactive addresses) split from soft ones (a full inbox).
- Spam complaint rate: how often recipients mark you as spam, the signal inbox providers weigh most heavily.
- Open and click trends: steady engagement tells providers your mail is wanted; a cliff after one send tells you something broke.
- Provider-level patterns: engagement that drops at one inbox provider while holding steady elsewhere points to a reputation problem with that provider specifically.
Why an email deliverability audit matters
An email that lands in spam never gets a chance to convert, no matter how good the creative is, so deliverability caps every other improvement you make. And the bar keeps moving: inbox providers tighten their filtering and sender requirements year over year, which is why an audit is a habit rather than a one-time fix.
A few of the benefits of auditing regularly:
- Problems caught early: a rising complaint rate is a quick fix in week one and a weeks-long reputation repair in month three.
- A specific diagnosis: you learn whether the issue is your list, your authentication, or your content, instead of guessing at all three.
- Revenue you already earned: recovering inbox placement lifts every campaign and flow you're already sending.
Why choose Klaviyo for your deliverability audit
A deliverability audit pulls signals from reporting, segmentation, and sending infrastructure, and in Klaviyo those all run on one customer profile. You diagnose and fix in the same place, instead of exporting reports from one tool to act on them in another.
Deliverability numbers on every send
Klaviyo's campaign and flow reporting breaks those signals out per send, so you can trace a drop to the specific campaign, flow, or audience that caused it instead of staring at a blended monthly average.
Hygiene that runs on live engagement data
Inbox providers watch who opens and who ignores you, so mailing people who never open tells them your mail isn't wanted. Klaviyo's segmentation isolates profiles by engagement recency, and a sunset flow phases out the chronic non-openers automatically, so the list teaches providers the opposite lesson.
Sender infrastructure with guardrails built in
Authentication records like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC prove your mail comes from you, and getting them wrong sends campaigns to spam no matter what's inside. Klaviyo guides dedicated sending domain and authentication setup, and Guided Warming keeps reputation steady when sends spike around a launch.
Key features that protect deliverability in Klaviyo
Feature | Description | Available with Klaviyo |
|---|---|---|
Per-send reporting | Every campaign and flow reports its own numbers, so one bad send stands out | ✅ |
Engagement-recency segments | Audiences split by recent opens and clicks, so you always know who's active and who's gone quiet | ✅ |
Sunset flows | Automated sequences give quiet subscribers a last chance, then stop mailing them | ✅ |
Guided Warming | Ramps sending volume gradually on new or growing sending infrastructure | ✅ |
Reputation Repair AI | Adjusts how sends ramp back up after a deliverability dip | ✅ |
How to get started with Klaviyo
To run your deliverability audit in Klaviyo:
- Read your baseline first. Pull your send metrics for the last 30 days and note anything that spiked or cliffed.
- Verify your authentication. Confirm SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are configured on a dedicated sending domain, not a shared one.
- Sunset your silent subscribers. Build a lapsed-subscriber segment, give it one win-back series, and suppress the profiles that stay quiet.
- Audit each flow's engagement. Review delivery and engagement metrics flow by flow, and tighten the timing or targeting on the low performers.
- Check your content last. Match subject lines to what the email delivers, keep one clear call to action, and drop the all-caps urgency that trips filters and readers alike.
Brands on Klaviyo see an average of 63x ROI on email, and that number only holds when the email reaches the inbox. Ready to find what's hurting your placement? Get started with Klaviyo today.