What to ask your agency about email deliverability

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on email deliverability, these questions are worth asking early.

The realistic threat for most small businesses is automated and opportunistic, not targeted. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Authentication records decide whether mail reaches the inbox. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

Monitor bounces before a campaign, not after. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

What this looks like day to day

The cheapest security work is the boring kind done on a schedule. Three things worth confirming about email deliverability before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Authentication records decide whether mail reaches the inbox — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.