No one ever asks me this, but they should: What’s the easiest, fastest way to improve the health of your email list?

Even though my over-marketed brain is allergic to anything that sounds gimmicky, this one has a surprisingly real answer:

Subscribe to your own damn list.

That’s it. Opt in like you’re a stranger. Walk through the front door you built. Then actually read the emails you receive.

This may sound too simple to matter. But every time I do this for clients in a Quick Deliverability Check, we find something broken, misaligned, or outdated. Every. Time.

What's your first impression?

Just like websites, welcome sequences and opt-in forms are often created during a launch or rebrand and then left alone for months (or years). They become the digital equivalent of a dusty welcome mat. And yet, they’re still the first thing your new subscribers see.

Your business has evolved. Your offers have shifted. Your voice is sharper. But your emails? They're still trying to make a first impression with an outdated bio and broken links.

Twice now, I found two separate, conflicting welcome sequences running for the same list. Both times, the client had no idea. It wasn’t showing up in their email marketing platform (ESP) dashboard because it was running on two separate platforms. But I caught it because I subscribed. 

Another time, I spotted broken authentication by looking at email headers from the subscriber side. They thought everything was fine because their platform showed green checkmarks. Nope.

The system lies. Your inbox doesn’t.

Your ESP will show you the logic map—the clean lines and triggered flows. But what subscribers get in their inbox can be a different story. Maybe a stray tag got applied. Maybe a sequence was cloned and forgotten. Maybe a conditional block is failing silently.

You don’t need to run a fancy tool to catch these things.

You just need to see what your subscribers see.

The stakes are high

If your first few emails are confusing, irrelevant, or feel off-brand, people won’t complain. They’ll just stop reading. Or unsubscribe. Or mark it as spam.

And those quiet exits hurt your deliverability, your reputation, and your bottom line.

This is especially true if you’re spending time and money to grow your list. Every ad click, every SEO win, every podcast appearance is wasted if the follow-up is out of sync.

What to do this week

Here’s your assignment:

Bonus points: check the email headers using Gmail’s "Show original" feature to see if SPF/DKIM/DMARC are aligned.

You don’t need to fix everything right away. But you do need to know what’s happening. Because if your emails are off, everything else downstream is too.

Want me to do this for you? This (and more) is what I do in my Quick Deliverability Audit. I subscribe to your list, review your first impressions, check your authentication, and spot risks most tools miss.