The goal of running an email marketing audit is to examine existing emails and decide what is working and what is not. It is challenging to choose what to send in emails, when to send them, and how often they should be sent. The purpose of conducting an audit is to define business goals clearly and make important decisions based on the data and metrics that are collected.
After reviewing these analytics, you can consider what will make campaigns more successful. This is an essential process for ensuring profitable and useful strategies for your company’s email marketing.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is sending commercial messages to potential or current customers. When customers agree to receive more information, businesses can send updates, newsletters, blog posts, and more. It is essential for reaching potential customers – every email sent can be considered email marketing.
Effective options for email marketing are automations, website pop-ups, newsletters, and more. Each business must strategize and implement the best option for their brand, considering cost and target audience. These strategies result in optimal growth by informing consumers of the brand and keeping them engaged between purchases.
What Is an Email Marketing Audit?
An email marketing audit helps companies pinpoint the issues or successes with their email —the email lists, the time when they are sent, how the content is operating between the sender and recipient, etc. This report gives an in-depth analysis of the efficacy of a current email marketing campaign within a certain time.
This process has become essential for ensuring successful strategies. Bringing attention to the strengths and weaknesses allows you to fix issues and improve results for the future. Any optimizations provided can be used to make necessary changes and prevent future issues.
Why Run an Audit?
There are many reasons why it is wise for your company to run an email marketing audit. Those reasons are as follows:
- Ensure your automations are setup correctly
- Benchmark email efforts against industry standards
- Understand how users are interacting with your emails
- Leverage learnings to maximize success for future emails
- Make sure links are working properly
- Check that the proper connections are in order
Design / Branding
Emails should have consistent colors and fonts used throughout each email. Even better is aligning email marketing to a brand guide. By doing this, the assets created for advertising are clear, concise, and efficient.
Content Audit
The process begins with assessing the email campaigns, automation setup, and more regarding the content as a whole. The most effective content metrics are user behavior, engagement, and sales – choose the best metrics that you can apply to your content and utilize the tools for measuring them.
Email Copy Analysis
The goal of email marketing copy is to get the correct point across to the audience and inspire a call to action (CTA). Analyzing copy is important in the email marketing audit process because you can look at the best performing copy and center on why it was successful.
The audit assists in better understanding the recipient’s likes and dislikes. For example, seeing if there are similarities between the copy that was used for the best performing emails. There could be a specific length that tends to work the best, like noticing whether the audience prefers longer or shorter paragraphs. All of these components are important for creating upcoming content.
Effectiveness of the Email Marketing Campaigns
There are different ways of deciding the success of an email marketing campaign. A successful one will get the recipients to act, engage with the business, and help get more leads and sales. Emails to current and potential customers may drive engagement and increase brand awareness.
Sending an engaging email to a qualified email list with impressive copy is only the first step. To reach success, data must be collected in order to improve future campaigns – testing everything from the design, layout, copy, subject lines, and CTA. An email marketing audit provides the metrics that result from this method of testing.
Email Marketing Audit Checklist
There are a few important questions to consider when continuing an email marketing campaign and planning to run an audit:
- Are the emails being sent still relevant to the recipients?
- Do the templates still work that are being used?
- Do you need to speak to customers/staff for more data?
Remember to gather and analyze the following information:
- Campaign averages
- Automation averages
- Welcome Series averages
- Abandoned Cart averages
- Thank You Automation averages
The email marketing software that you are currently using will likely have reports that you can compare, assess, and pull from to gather accurate information for the audit.
Industry Benchmarks
Email marketing benchmarks are the metrics used to measure the success of an email campaign. The most common email marketing benchmarks are open rate and click-through rate. By analyzing these for improvements, it could be possible to increase revenue directly from emails.
The platforms that Rise Marketing Group use are Mailchimp, Privy, HubSpot, Active Campaign, and Klaviyo. Each email marketing platform keeps the metric and data of their industry benchmarks. This can also calculate the average open, click, and bounce rates. Your company may decipher what is working, what is not, or what needs to be changed.
Email Marketing Audit Sample
Here is an example of what an email marketing audit typically looks like when the report is displayed. Rise Marketing Group chooses to attach a slideshow for clients to better explain the metrics collected and what that means for the company, so that it is easier to discuss or read for themselves.
Run an Email Marketing Audit Today
Are you ready to run an email marketing audit and verify the effectiveness of your email campaigns? If you are facing any challenges in this area or want to explore new opportunities, contact us today through our email marketing services link.
