By Kevin George
Ask any email marketing specialist about where they invest most of their efforts, and they will say email audits. And this is no coincidence, as getting a $42 ROI requires you to ensure that all your efforts are made in a harmonic manner without any element creating counter effects. If you are a budding email marketer or a business owner who’s facing trouble with campaign results or wants to optimize your efforts, you’re at the right place. As an email marketing specialist with extensive experience in conducting email audits for various brands, here are my two cents on the topic. Let’s get started.
What Is Email Marketing Audit
An email audit is a detailed evaluation of how effective your email marketing processes are. It will allow you to figure out what works well in your e-marketing routine, find any problems in it, and fix them. Both the internal marketing team and an email marketing agency can conduct an email audit for you.
What Is The Need For You To Do Email Marketing Audit
Email audit helps to pin down and resolve the various issues mentioned,
- Deliverability – Check if your emails reach the subscriber’s primary folder and see if there’s an issue with the messages that might impact their deliverability.
- Security – See whether you have all the required settings to ensure safe information transmission and the quality of your mailing list.
- Effectiveness – Track whether your email campaigns bring you the desired revenue through ideal email metrics.
- Content Quality – Check whether the subject line and the preheader bring opens, click-throughs and whether the copy of your emails is engaging enough. It also takes your CTA copy into consideration during evaluation.
- Sender Reputation – Figure out if your sender’s reputation is in a good state by counting the number of hard and soft bounces, blacklist status, and spam complaints.
5 Things You Should Look At During An Email Marketing Audit
In this section, we will have an overview of five things that you need to consider from email strategy POV when analysing the results of your email audits.
1. Email Marketing Infrastructure
We are referring to the basic physical and technological setup every organization needs to ensure their emails hit the right inboxes when they are supposed to. Your email marketing infrastructure is made up of – DNS records, dedicated IP address and IP reputation, authentication, reply and response addresses, integrations, and standardized and required links. They should be thoroughly checked, and concerned tools should be updated regularly apart from regular employee training. Otherwise, you may risk your email reputation and tanking your email marketing program together.
2. Quality Of Email Lists And Audience Segmentation
Every email marketing strategy begins with the email list. The better your email list, the more effective and satisfactory your email campaigns will be. Often, marketers send out mass emails to their entire list without segmenting the subscribers. At the same time, a lack of segmentation raises a red flag during an email audit. Therefore, you should always look at how you segment your email lists because the right email segmentation can drastically enhance your email marketing results.
In fact, segmented email generates more opens and more clicks than non-segmented email campaigns. Segmentation isn’t something you can just set up once and generate results for the rest of the time. It requires constant testing and monitoring of your subscribers. Using double opt-ins and removing disengaged subscribers periodically helps streamline the processes during the email audit.
3. Sender Name And Email Address
Your sender name should be trustworthy and recognizable because, without this, your subscribers may not open your emails. Have you ever received an email with a no-reply address? It generates a feeling that the sender is not interested in hearing what subscribers have to say. As a result, the email performance is sabotaged. An audit report will put light on how you can make your email addresses, sender names, and titles more effective according to the industry and nature of your business. For instance, retail brands or ecommerce can have the brand name as the sender name, whereas service brand companies without a strong identity benefit by including an individual’s name.
4. Subject Lines And Email Copy
With any aspect of your email marketing strategy, it is easy to understand what you lack when it comes to subject lines. Your subject line and preheader text determine open rates and your overall success at large. Use a spreadsheet or even better, proper audit tool and analyze email campaigns and individual messages by the open rate. Then, work to identify commonalities between the subject lines that were most rewarding and those that didn’t do as well. See if the character guidelines and conformance by preheader text.
You should also run an extensive email copy analysis to see how well your content strategy coincides with your sender intent. Also, it should be in line with what the subscribers want to receive, their current position in your sales funnel, and their customer journey. This may be more time consuming than other tasks but keeping your content strategy in line with your email strategy is a must.
5. Email Workflow And Processes
At the large and medium-sized organizations, there may be a variety of emails deployed daily, some pre-planned, some automatically, some directed at customers, some detailing new product releases, and so on and so forth. The errors in your strategy start to amplify as the marketing efforts grow in size and frequency. Due to this reason, it is recommended that you finalize your email marketing strategy after looking at the automation workflows. Firstly, it allows you to identify inefficiencies and problems. Secondly, it gives the chance to streamline the process and correct any errors you uncover. Lastly, it gives you a good idea of the resources you are working with, including vital tools and personnel.
Summing Up
As we can see, email audits are the foundations for email marketing strategies. Perhaps, there’s no sureshot formula to success in email marketing, and every brand comes up with their secret sauce to success over a period of time. Email audits act as catalysts to speed up the process, and they also ensure that you don’t lose any revenue-paying opportunity in the meanwhile. I hope this article helps you understand why email audits are an indispensable part of your email marketing strategy.
About the Author
Kevin George is the head of marketing at Email Uplers, which specializes in crafting Professional Email Templates, PSD to Email Conversion, and Mailchimp Templates. Kevin loves gadgets, bikes & jazz, and he breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on email marketing blog.
