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How to Conduct an Email Marketing Audit
How to know if your email marketing campaign is working? How to ensure that your messaging promotions are performing well, and what aspects of your campaign need some adjustment to improve the chances of success?
Monitoring the metrics is crucial to an effective email marketing campaign. Part of your responsibility is to conduct an email marketing audit to ensure every aspect of the marketing campaign delivers results. But what is an email marketing audit, and how do you run one? What's so essential about conducting an email marketing audit? We're answering all these questions and more with this guide!
What is an Email Marketing Audit?
The word “audit” may sound too technical, but in a nutshell, it's a comprehensive assessment of your email marketing campaign to determine which strategies are working and which are not working. The audit consists of small tasks and quick steps to fix problems and build a better-performing marketing campaign.
For best results, you must conduct an email marketing audit at least once a year – ideally at the beginning or end of a year. But for bigger businesses that send hundreds of emails monthly, audit the marketing campaign twice yearly.
Email marketing auditing involves reviewing different elements of a marketing strategy to determine its strengths, weaknesses, and areas that can be improved. The audit involves assessing the analytics of your marketing campaigns, checking the performance of your list segmentation strategies, reviewing the content and visuals of email campaigns, and identifying high and low-performing strategies. The goal is to:
- Improve the effectiveness of the email campaigns
- Boost user engagement
- Ensure compliance with regulations
- Increase revenues
An email marketing audit can be done on your own, but since the process is quite comprehensive, you're likely to need help gathering data for analysis and implementation. This is a task that's best done as a team. Some of the aspects of the marketing campaign that require assessment are:
Subscriber List
Part of the audit involves evaluating the quality of your email list, determining which subscribers are opening emails, clicking on your links, and interacting with your messages to show interest or responsiveness. If the engagement is low on a particular subscriber list, you can plan a re-engagement campaign or clean the email list – removing subscribers with zero interactions with your content.
Email Content and Design
How efficiently are your email contest and visuals keeping readers engaged? Your email copy and design should be attractive and on-brand to capture the intended audience's attention. During the audit, you have to review the following elements:
- Subject lines
- Body Content
- Visuals/Assets
- Calls to Action
- Branding
- Personalisation
Reviewing these elements allows you to maintain visually appealing, engaging, and on-brand messaging.
Automation and Personalisation
If you're using any automation and personalisation tools, like Flodesk, for example, you need to know if any of the marketing strategies you're implementing are working. Some elements that require an evaluation are triggered emails, personalised content, segmentation strategies, and the overall onboarding experience.
Deliverability
Are your marketing messages reaching the intended recipients? You need to check different factors that affect email deliverability, such as:
- Bounce rates
- Spam complaints
- Sender reputation
- Email Authentication
- Sender reputation
- Spam filters
The goal is to ensure your messages reach subscribers' inboxes and avoid being flagged as spam. To avoid deliverability issues, your sender's reputation should be high, and spam complaints must be low.
Metrics and Analytics
Measuring the metrics is critical to a successful email marketing campaign. The analytics have valuable infos needed to build and maintain an effective marketing strategy. The metrics you will analyse include the following:
- Clickthrough rates
- Conversions
- Open rates
- Bounce rates
- Unsubscribe rates
- Campaign ROI
If you're using Flodesk for your email marketing campaign, the platform made it easier to measure the metrics by launching its Flodesk Analytics tool. This tool presents visualised data to identify critical areas of improvement and optimise future email marketing campaigns.
Compliance and Legal Considerations
Your business should adhere to email marketing regulations such as the CAN-SPAM Act or GDPR. This requires setting proper consent and opt-out mechanisms to protect data security and user information. Complying with these regulations will improve your sender reputation and boost customer trust.
A Step-by-Step Guide to Implementing an Email Audit
Step 1: Plan the Audit
You want the audit to be simple, straightforward, yet accurate. This task will require a lot of data collection and processing, so planning ahead is vital to avoid getting lost in all that data.
To start, plan the entire process to avoid complications and issues that require more time to sort out. Begin by choosing which areas of your email marketing campaign to audit ex: email marketing performance, email design, email automation, email accessibility, email compliance, etc. Have a clear objective to determine what email marketing metrics to focus on.
You can hire a professional to get better results or use different email testing tools to collect data. Remember, don't use too many tools to collect email marketing data because you might end up with inconsistent results.
Once you've selected the metrics you want to track, create a spreadsheet to outline the collected data.
Step 2: Conduct the Audit
With your spreadsheet, it's time to mine data. Download the stats and metrics, and save them in a CSV file. Add the data to your spreadsheet in relevant colour-coded columns. Once you've arranged all the data in the spreadsheet, start comparing the metrics and determine your best and worst.
Identify key areas that need improvement and compare benchmark data for the best and worst-performing emails. Highlight the best and worst-performing emails and see why these messages are getting high or low open rates/conversions.
Step 3: Work on Underperforming Emails
Ultimately, you want the subscribers to take the desired action after opening your marketing messages. But sometimes, things don't happen the way you planned. Some emails end up being unopened. You have to know the reason why and solve the problem.
After comparing the metrics and identifying your worst-performing emails, find ways to make these messages more appealing to subscribers. Change up the subject lines, add attractive images, and create a more consistent, compelling copy.
Check the calls to action, email designs, topics, and links. See if any of these elements are causing issues that affect the user experience. It's equally important to check if the email looks good on all screens, including mobile phones, because this can affect user engagement.
Step 4: Implement Changes and Testing
After identifying issues with your email marketing campaign, you can take action. Make a report outlining areas that require improvement, roll out solutions, track your progress, and remember to conduct A/B tests before implementing changes you made. It will be harder to solve a hiccup if you've made changes en masse without testing.
Once the tests are completed, you can start implementing the changes for real, this time. At this point, continue tracking your email marketing metrics and make continuous improvements.
Conducting an email marketing audit is a critical part of any promotional efforts, don't skip it!
With these tips, you can conduct your own email marketing audit. Do revisit your marketing strategies to determine if your marketing messages are still resonating with your core audience.
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