Email Marketing Audits: Fresh Perspective, Improved Results
Managing an email list and delivering personalized, effective content isn’t easy. No matter how experienced your team might be, there are always opportunities to improve key metrics and derive more value from your email marketing. An email marketing audit is one way to identify those opportunities and position your team for success.
Learn more about the benefits of email audits and a few ways to use email list segmentation and automation to increase quality traffic and conversions from your email marketing efforts.
What Is an Email Marketing Audit?
An email marketing audit is an in-depth evaluation of your email strategy, campaigns, and automations. The goal is to determine what’s working and identify ways to improve results so you get more out of every email. Depending on your current setup, your email audit might include:
Email list segmentation
Email automation (also known as email flows or drip campaigns)
Email list health
The Benefits of an Email Marketing Audit
While results vary across industries, clients, and even specific email lists, regular email marketing audits offer substantial performance benefits.
Better Metrics (Open rate, clicks, and conversions)
Email audits are based primarily on establishing list-specific average benchmarks and improving key performance indicators, or KPIs. A well-run email audit will recommend changes to improve KPIs like open and click-through rates. Those recommendations include updating email template designs, new email segments to improve content relevancy, or A/B testing email automations to improve metrics incrementally.
Improve Quality
Improving metrics also indicates higher-quality content delivered to your subscribers. An email audit will identify high-performing campaigns, automations, or newsletters, and note any content trends that may interest your audience. This will inform future emails but can also guide additional content opportunities, such as SEO-rich blogs, social media posts, or designed resources like PDF checklists.
Related: 5 Types of Emails to Automate for Your Small Business
The Components of an Email Audit
At Sovis Media, our email marketing audit services are typically divided into a few components, although every account is unique.
Performance Audit
We start by evaluating the KPIs mentioned above and comparing them against industry email benchmarks. The goal is to determine the list’s strengths and weaknesses, which will ultimately inform many of the recommendations included in the email audit report.
Email List Health
Managing an email list is an ongoing process; list health is the pulse used to monitor its quality. Platforms like Klaviyo and Mailchimp have list health scores (included on most paid plans) that use metrics like bounce rate and unsubscribe rate to determine the state of your list.
Content Review
In addition to evaluating interest in specific topics, an in-depth email audit will also look at the copy and email design. Good email templates follow brand guidelines, use engaging copy and can’t-help-but-click subject lines and preview text. Audits should also look at email deliverability and compliance to ensure the list follows email marketing laws like the CAN-SPAM Act.
Automation and Workflow Evaluation
We’ll also take a closer look at your email marketing automation. Audits should look at the performance of each email within automated flows to identify opportunities to improve results. Even small changes to email flow triggers, such as sending emails sooner or waiting to send emails based on the time of day, can have a massive impact on results. For example, we found that delaying abandoned cart emails after 7 pm increased click-through rates by over 15% for one ecommerce client. That’s huge!
Email Marketing Audit Tools and Software
Even if you’re relatively new to email marketing, there are several tools that can make the process easy and understandable. Not quite as easy, understandable, or as effective as tapping in an expert (hey, hi), but still useful.
Your Email Software
Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Klayvio (personal favorite) - they all offer automatic reporting and analytics to establish a baseline and recommend ways to improve. For example, HubSpot will offer tips to subject line and preview text, plus ways to improve email deliverability.
Google Analytics
If you’re getting emails to subscribers with high deliverability, open rates, and click rates, evaluate the quality of that content by analyzing how email sessions compare to other channels on your website. In most cases, sessions from emails tend to have an average engagement rate comparable to organic search and usually have session key event rates at or above your site's average.
Domain Reputation Testing
Domain reputation is a score generated by tools like MxToolbox and Google Postmaster. The score indicates whether your website domain is reputable and whether suspicious domains (including those sending thousands of spam emails per day) are being blacklisted. You can check your domain here.
Start Your Email Marketing Audit Today
From segmenting email lists to running creative A/B tests, email marketing audits inform strategy and fine-tune tactics. Get more value from every email sent this year with an expert email marketing audit by Sovis Media. For nearly a decade, we’ve helped northern Michigan businesses and non-profits with digital marketing and business consulting services.
Ready to get started? Let’s get coffee.