5 Signs You Need an Email Marketing Audit and How to Do It
An email marketing audit is a comprehensive evaluation of your marketing performance conducted to identify areas for improvement.
Think of an email marketing audit as a regular health checkup for your email list. It detects issues like inactive subscribers, low engagement, and spam traps.
Email marketing can be a powerful tool for nurturing leads and building lasting customer relationships. But how do you know if your results are at their maximum or if it’s time for a tune-up?
We’ll explore tell-tale signs that your email marketing needs a refresh and explain how to conduct an audit properly.
What is an Email Marketing Audit?
An email marketing audit evaluates your marketing efforts, such as strategy, campaign, and overall email list health. It helps you identify problems and build a road map for future success.
However, an audit doesn’t necessarily have to cover every element of email marketing. You can check specifics such as email deliverability performance, and campaign insights, or check the overall effectiveness of your strategy. It all depends on your brand goals.
Benefits of an Email Marketing Audit
Auditing your email performance magnifies the areas that resonate with the audience. For example, recipients might continuously open emails with funny subject lines and rarely open ones with a serious tone, revealing a preference for humor in your communication style.
An audit provides insights and helps with the following aspects:
- It removes guesswork: An audit showcases a complete picture of what’s working, allowing you to make informed decisions about your marketing efforts.
- It identifies hidden strengths: The report can identify hidden strengths you need to know to build a sound email marketing strategy.
- It increases engagement: By understanding what works for your audience, you can improve open rates, click-through rates, and conversions.
- It improves email deliverability: Email audits can identify technical issues hindering your emails from reaching recipient inboxes. Fixing these issues can significantly boost your email deliverability rate.
- It maximizes ROI: Audit reports allow you to optimize campaigns better, streamlining efforts and improving return on investment.
- It uncovers industry trends: Email audits help you understand industry trends and best practices you might otherwise miss. This comprehensive knowledge can help you stay ahead of the curve and maximize customer engagement.
- It helps remove inactive members: Audit reports help you focus on quality rather than quantity by helping you remove inactive subscribers from your email list.
Depending on your brand goals, you should test the whole strategy or specific parts of an email marketing campaign. Let’s examine the different elements an email marketing audit covers.
What Does an Email Marketing Audit Cover?
An email audit provides insights into the subject lines, open rates, and identifies personalization opportunities.
You may also find yourself addressing one or more aspects in the table below.
| Email Audit Area | What it does |
|---|---|
| Performance analysis | It analyzes key campaign metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, bounce rates, and unsubscribe rates to understand the campaign’s effectiveness. |
| List health assessment | It evaluates subscriber engagement, identifies inactive subscribers, and checks for spam traps within your email list. |
| Segmentation strategy overview | It assesses how you segment your email list and explores opportunities for further personalization based on subscriber data and behavior. |
| Content and design evaluation | It evaluates email design elements such as visuals, layout, mobile responsiveness, and CTA effectiveness. Additionally, it analyzes email copywriting, tone, and clarity to ensure it aligns with the audiences’ needs. |
| Compliance check | Email audit ensures you follow legal best practices following GDPR, CAN-SPAM Act, and other data privacy regulations. |
| Technical setup review | It reviews your email service provider’s (ESP) settings for optimal functionality. |
We’ll learn more about the key email audit areas above.
1. Performance Analysis
By dissecting the email campaign performance, you can understand where optimizations are required. That gives you an opportunity to know if the changes align with the audiences’ interests.
Reporting on common metrics, such as open rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribe rates gives you a chance to compare them before and after the email audit.
2. List Health Assessment
The email audit evaluates the subscriber engagement levels with metrics such as open and click-through rates. Additional metrics reporting, like unsubscribe rate, gives you an overview of the list quality and segmentation issues.
You also evaluate the quality of subscribers by identifying those who haven’t opened emails in a while. Based on their preferences, these contacts can be removed or targeted with re-engagement campaigns.
The audit also checks for spam traps that can hurt your email deliverability performance so you can remove them immediately.
3. Segmentation Strategy Overview
How you segment the email list can affect how people engage with your email content. Effective segmentation helps you send targeted content based on subscriber preferences, past behavior, and demographics, among other segmentation models.
You can further explore ways to personalize emails based on subscriber data and behavior. This can significantly improve the relevance and impact of your emails.
Pro Tip: If you would like to combine various audience groups for the same email campaign, our recent “Audience Groups” feature can help.
4. Content and Design Evaluation
Email audit analyzes the email copy and design for relevance and engagement opportunities. The ultimate goal is to achieve a positive user experience across devices. Ensuring your emails are mobile-responsive encourages people to take the desired action.
You will also assess the effectiveness of the call-to-action buttons. Are they appropriate, do the colors work, and do people understand what they must do next? An email audit answers these questions and helps you focus on the right strategies.
5. Compliance and Technical Setup Review
Compliance with email marketing laws can reduce spam complaints and maintain a good sender reputation score. An email audit showcases whether you abide by the data privacy regulations such as the GDPR and CAN-SPAM Act.
It’ll also help you recognize if your ESP uses authentication protocols such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to improve deliverability and prevent emails from being flagged as spam.
Campaign Refinery adheres to email marketing best practices. All emails our clients send out include a true one-click unsubscribe and DKIM authentication by default.
Whether you assess one or all of the above aspects, you need an action plan to know what works and what doesn’t. You’ll usually see signs to perform an email audit, such as lower email response rates or stagnant email marketing metrics.
5 Signs You Need an Email Marketing Audit
Sometimes, you keep sending out email campaigns, but the results fail to meet your expectations. This indicates the need for an email marketing audit.
Here are five signs your email marketing strategy needs a refresh:
- Flatlining metrics: Stagnant or declining open rates, click-through rates, and conversions signify deeper issues with the marketing strategy. An email audit can help diagnose and fix these problems, whether irrelevant content or technical deliverability issues.
- High unsubscribe rates: When many people opt out of your email communication, it proves the emails are missing the mark. An email audit can identify and suggest ways to improve this metric.
- List growth stagnation: Sometimes, your list can feel stagnant despite the strategies to nurture existing subscribers or gain new ones. An audit will show you what’s missing and how to fix it.
- Low sales or conversions: Not seeing the desired sales or conversions from your campaigns can mean the strategy needs to be fixed. By auditing, you can strengthen the CTAs and optimize the email marketing funnel for conversions.
- Feeling out of touch: Your email strategy may be outdated or not align with current email marketing trends. An email audit can show industry best practices and keep emails fresh and relevant.
Recognizing these signs earlier can save your brand reputation. However, the most important step is defining your goals and preparing an email audit team.
We’ll review additional steps to performing an email marketing audit for the best outcome.
How to Perform an Email Marketing Audit
Whether you’re auditing the entire strategy or a specific element, the steps below will guide you through the process.
1. Define Your Goals and Scope
An email audit can be tedious, so we broke down the process to help you focus on the most critical aspects.
Ask yourself the following questions:
- What do you want to achieve? Do you want to improve conversions, increase security, or perform a regular audit? Answering these will help you enhance your overall email strategy.
- How deep will you go? A regular audit provides key insights into email metrics and list health, while a comprehensive audit will delve into all aspects of email strategy.
Your email audit can be for more than one aspect, but clearly defining them will help you retain focus on the scope.
2. Gather Your Data and Tools
Review the tools you’ve been using for email audits. If you’re using an ESP, compile data for all email metrics you wish to audit. Ensure all the data comply with legal regulations for various industries.
In addition to metrics, gather information on your list health by identifying inactive subscribers and promptly removing them from your list.
Campaign Refinery offers a clean user interface and a robust reporting platform. Our clients can access comprehensive analytics, track performance, and improve their results through better email deliverability.
As an alternative, Google Sheets can be used to track the progress of an email audit, including the campaigns already assessed.
Your columns can include the following information:
- Email campaign name,
- Date it started,
- Audience segment name,
- Subject line,
- Bounce rates,
- Click-through rates,
- Unsubscribe rates,
- Conversion rates.
You can add more details based on the elements you want to track.
3. Email Elements to Consider for an Email Audit
List the most relevant audit areas based on your marketing goals. You may perform a full audit or focus on smaller areas like increasing open rates or including better interactive elements.
Here’s a table listing the different elements to use for an email audit.
| Email Element | Questions to consider |
|---|---|
| Subject line | ‣ Is it relevant and engaging? ‣ Is it personalized? |
| Preheader text | ‣ Does it provide additional context? ‣ Is it compelling? |
| Sender name and email address | ‣ Is it recognizable and trustworthy? |
| Layout and structure | ‣ Is it visually appealing and easy to read? ‣ Is the structure well-spaced? |
| Colors and fonts | ‣ Are the colors and fonts consistent with the brand image? ‣ Are they easily accessible? |
| Email content | ‣ Is it personalized and relevant? ‣ Is dynamic content included? ‣ Is the message clear and to the point? ‣ Are the CTAs compelling and easy to read? |
| Technical aspect and compliance | ‣ Are emails properly authenticated? ‣ Are there issues with spam filters? ‣ Is the email responsive and easy to read? ‣ Does the loading take time? ‣ Is the subscriber information handled with precaution? ‣ Are there clear opt-out options? |
| Analytics | ‣ What percentage of people open the emails? ‣ How many click on the links inside emails? ‣ What percentage of recipients take the desired action after reading the email? ‣ How many unsubscribe from receiving emails? |
| Audience engagement | ‣ Are people clicking on the interactive elements within an email? ‣ Are there options for users to share the email on social media? |
| Frequency and timing | ‣ How often do you send emails? ‣ Are emails sent at optimal times based on the recipient’s timezone and preferences? |
Correlate all elements in the audit to your email customer journey. Your goal must be to retain customer interest until they click the CTA button.
4. Analyze Your Email Performance
At this stage, you will assess the impact of campaign performance and set benchmarks to compare the metrics against. This will help you optimize relevant metrics for improved conversions.
You can also compare your performance against industry averages or your previous email audit. For example, if you want to know how many members click the CTA button, you can track the conversion rate.
Other standard metrics to track are:
To measure audience engagement, consider the percentage of people who opt out or are inactive. Using this data, you can re-engage and win-back lost clients through targeted email coupons, special offers, and informational content.
5. A/B Test and Optimize Emails
After identifying the areas for improvement, you should split-test them to see if your strategies work. Choose variable A as the base and variable B as the contender. Test only one variable at a time.
For example, to understand if your mobile email marketing works, tweak the email layout in variation B. Also, test the variations in different email clients to ensure proper display across devices.
6. Create a Logical Action Plan
An email audit can become visually overwhelming without a proper plan of action. For example, if your conversion rate suffers because of your email list health, consider a plan to identify and address these issues. In this case, you will clean the email list and remove inactive contacts.
7. Analyze the Results
Once you have identified the problematic areas, you want to implement measures to rectify them. Regularly track the progress to understand marketing performance.
Remember, an email audit is cyclical. Continue periodic audits to maintain optimal email health.
Tips and Best Practices For Conducting an Email Marketing Audit
In the bigger picture, an email marketing audit can look like a cumbersome process. However, breaking it down into manageable pieces can enhance its effectiveness.
Follow these best practices to conduct a successful email audit:
- Build an audit team: Involving others in your email audit will help spot errors and streamline various aspects.
- Set SMART goals: Define specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goals. For example, “I want to increase conversions by 15% in the next quarter.”
- Prioritize high-impact changes: Instead of trying to fix everything at once, focus on the most impactful areas that will yield results faster.
- Remove inactive subscribers: Removing inactive people on your list will speed up the process and give you accurate results.
- Stay up-to-date: Be informed of the latest email marketing trends and how they might affect the audit outcome.
More importantly, choose the right email audit tool to achieve the best results.
We’ll explore the most common tools used in an email marketing audit.
Best Tools to Perform an Email Marketing Audit
The table below contains tools and software to maximize the audit’s effectiveness.
| Category | Tools |
|---|---|
| ESP (Built-in analytics) | ‣ Campaign Refinery ‣ Litmus ‣ Mailchimp ‣ or similar platforms |
| List hygiene and verification tools | ‣ Campaign Refinery ‣ Zerobounce ‣ Bouncer |
| Analytics and reporting tools | ‣ Campaign Refinery ‣ Google Analytics ‣ Hubspot ‣ Marketo |
If you’re looking for all the above tools in a single platform, choose Campaign Refinery—a comprehensive email marketing platform for all your tracking, analytics, list hygiene, and audit needs.
Build Your Email Marketing Audit Report With Campaign Refinery
Campaign Refinery provides a holistic approach to email marketing audits.
Our clients can:
- View email marketing analytics from a user-friendly dashboard.
- Increase email list quality through our integrated email list-cleaning tool.
- Implement and review authentication protocols and security best practices from a single place.
- Enhance email deliverability through our clean sending practices and high-speed sending engine.
Our clients steadily noticed a 600% increase in inbox placement after joining us.
Do you want to create valuable email marketing audits and achieve the highest deliverability rate on the market?
