Increasing open rates, click rates, and sales: If you want to achieve these results, an email marketing audit can help you accomplish that. That’s why I’ve collaborated with six email marketing experts to assist you in creating your own audit.
What is an Email Marketing Audit?
An email marketing audit means reviewing your email strategy, campaigns, and the overall health of your account. Similar to a general marketing audit, the main goal is to understand what works and what doesn’t.
However, you can also uncover untapped opportunities for improvement.
Benefits of an Email Marketing Audit
I interviewed six email marketing experts to learn how the audit helped them and their lists. Here’s what they said about the importance of an email marketing audit.
Better open rates, click rates, and sales
“I was tasked with improving the open rates (OPR) and click rates (CTR) of the emails my client sends to their target audience,” says Gabriel Gan, Editor-in-Chief at In Real Life Malaysia.
The email list he worked with had about 250,000 active users.
“By using best email audit practices, my team and I were able to identify areas for improvement and increase our client’s open and click rates from 10-15% to 27-35%,” continues Gan.
In addition to open and click rates, sales also improved. Gan recalls “a 7% increase in sales on Black Friday compared to the previous year (100% to 107%).”
Finding what resonates with your audience
“An email audit is like a health check. It’s an opportunity to see what works and what doesn’t,” says Leah Parisian, Senior Content Strategist.
An email audit can help you understand what resonates best with your audience.
“At one company, we wanted to test whether questions in the subject line performed better than statements,” Parisian explains. “We experimented with this hypothesis and discovered that some segments preferred numbers and questions in the subject line, while others were less influenced by numbers and more by data on how to do something in the subject line.”
Gan mentions a similar experience regarding audience impact: “When I first started email marketing, the messages they were sending had a ‘hard sell’ approach in the text.”
Gan explains that traditionally, this approach is the best way to reach prospects. But “it didn’t do well in scaling to an international audience and across generations (ages 20 to 40) with a wide range of tastes and needs,” says Gan.
The audit helped Gan and the team uncover this and create more impact.
Anatomy of an Email Marketing Audit
The components of your email marketing audit depend on your ultimate goal. However, you may find yourself addressing all or some of the following areas:
Performance Metrics
For any audit, it’s normal to have a summary of your current standing. This provides you with a benchmark to see if your subsequent actions based on the audit are working or not.
A report on email performance metrics such as open rates, click rates, conversion rates, and return on investment will provide a baseline comparison. You can then compare the performance of your email campaigns before and after the audit.
List Health Analysis
You assess the quality and cleanliness of your email subscriber list. Reports typically include list size, list quality, segmentation, and any issues related to bounce rates and unsubscribe rates.
Content and Design Review
Analyze the email text and design in terms of quality, relevance, engagement, and consistency with brand identity. You’ll also want to check if the emails are mobile-friendly, accessible, and responsive.
EvaluationDelivery and Compliance
Typically, you will review postal delivery issues, spam complaints, and sender reputation at a minimum. You will also want to assess compliance with email marketing laws and regulations.
Automation and Workflow Evaluation
You will want to analyze any automated email workflows according to your segmentation strategy. If automation has not been implemented, you can report on actions needed to improve efficiency through automation.
You can also identify opportunities to streamline the current workflow.
Whether you audit one of these areas or all of them, you will need to prepare recommendations and an action plan. You can then enhance your email marketing strategy based on what works and fix what doesn’t.
How to Conduct an Email Marketing Audit
I asked experts Parisian, Baruchas, Chikovska, and Ghan how they conduct email marketing audits. Together, we created this nine-step process for conducting an email marketing audit.
You can apply these steps to the entire email audit or to a specific element you are focusing on.
1. Define Your Scope and Set Goals
“The most important thing is to define the scope. What is the goal of the email audit? Is it compliance? Security? Improving conversions?” says Parisian.
“It can be more than one thing, but the more specific you are with your scope, the less likely you are to lose focus or extend the audit period,” says Parisian.
At this stage, Parisian recommends selecting the most impactful area of email to audit. “You can conduct smaller audits. Pick one variable. Optimize it and test it, then address the next variable instead of covering everything,” explains Parisian.
From my experience in content audits, I recommend ensuring that your goals and email marketing objectives align with the broader business strategy.
This way, your efforts will focus on areas that help achieve the company’s overall goals.
I also recommend requesting everything you need to get the work done early on. If you get things like permissions and documentation early, you can avoid delays caused by chasing these things.
This applies if you are working within the company, but it is vital if you are an external vendor as you have fewer touchpoints with decision-makers.
2. Build the Audit Team
“Next, who will be on the audit team? If you are solving a security issue, do you need legal input? Cybersecurity?” says Parisian.
Once you’ve defined your team, Parisian recommends assigning roles and responsibilities and using project management tools.
3. Choose Audit Tools
“There are a lot of options [for tools]. You may already be using one,” says Parisian. “However, I do not recommend changing tools during the audit if you haven’t evaluated them. I consider that a separate activity.”
Parisian also explains that third-party solutions are often overlooked during audits. So, be sure to document these solutions, as they may affect security and compliance.
To stay aligned with your primary objective, Parisian also recommends identifying “the tools you use and how and for what purpose.”
4. Gather Data and Legal Review
“You want to ensure that everything you collect complies with privacy regulations like GDPR and HIPAA (in healthcare),” warns Parisian.
While it’s easy to overlook this step, it’s essential to ensure that you are compliant with email marketing laws in specific locations and industries.
5. List Areas You Want to Audit
At this stage, you want to list the areas most relevant to your goal and then audit them. If you are conducting a full audit, Baruchas recommends covering the following areas:
- Account structure
- Audiences
- Campaigns and content
- System connectivity
- Testing and improvements
- Tracking
You can also focus on a smaller area, such as increasing the conversion rate for a specific email campaign. The conversion action might be clicking a call-to-action button. Audit areas might include content and design.
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In this case, you want to audit the subject lines, design elements, text, and calls-to-action at a minimum.
6. Evaluate Impact Using Email Marketing Metrics
Now that you know your goals and the areas you want to audit, you need to evaluate them using relevant email marketing performance metrics. This will give you a benchmark to know how to move forward and have comparative data before and after the audit.
Some common email metrics include click-through rate, open rate, bounce rate, and list growth rate. But let’s stick to our example aimed at increasing the number of list members who click on the call-to-action button in the specific email campaign.
The metric in this case is the conversion rate. Here’s how you can measure it.
7. A/B Testing and Optimization
“When conducting the audit, the first step is to identify the areas you should look at. The second step is testing,” says Ghan. Ghan recommends following two main rules for A/B testing:
- Set email A as the control case.
- Set email B as the variation.
- Change only one variable at a time.
“For example, in email B, when testing open rates, just modify the subject line and don’t change the preview,” says Ghan.
This is because “if you have more than one variable changed from the old email, it’s almost impossible to determine which new addition contributed to improving open rates/click rates,” explains Ghan.
In addition to A/B testing campaigns, you can also listen to the email campaigns yourself.
“I test emails on different devices and in different email programs. I really try to get into the subscribers’ shoes, for example, by joining our email series,” says Chikovska.
She explains that this helps gain a personal perspective on the actual experience of our email audience.
8. Creating an Action Plan and Getting Approval
Now, you need to put all the results of the email marketing audit into a clear and logical action plan. From my experience in conducting audits, I recommend structuring the action plan in stages.
If you don’t, the data can be visually overwhelming, making it difficult to know where to start.
I also say to put actions that will have the greatest impact on your goals up front. This will increase stakeholder and team buy-in.
Once you have a clear action plan, you may need to present it to stakeholders, decision-makers, and/or senior team members for approval.
Parisian also recommends tailoring your analysis to your audience. For example, executives are busy. So, “a short presentation with critical stats and findings may be best. Or you can hold a meeting to discuss the results and recommendations if that’s what stakeholders prefer,” advises Parisian.
In short, Parisian suggests knowing your audience so that your recommendations are implemented. This is because conducting the audit is not enough. Convincing stakeholders to take action “requires equal focus and support.”
9. Implementing the Action Plan and Analyzing Results
When decision-makers approve your action plan, it’s time to implement the results of the email marketing audit. You can then analyze the results of your audit recommendations.
You should consider revisiting Ghan’s advice on A/B testing and the rules here – change one variable at a time and continue testing and optimizing in circulation.
However, implementation and analysis do not mean the work is done. You’ll also want to create a system for ongoing monitoring and reporting to track progress and make adjustments.
Parisian also recommends that “once the changes are approved, move forward, monitor what happens, and continue documenting. Having a record will enable you to conduct stronger audits in the future and avoid testing the same hypothesis again.”
Tips
To Conduct an Email Marketing Audit
Do you want to conduct an effective email marketing audit? Here’s what the email marketing experts I interviewed suggest.
Break it Down into Manageable Parts
“The number of things to review can be overwhelming at first, but breaking it down into smaller steps will help,” says Chekhovska.
Chekhovska suggests first defining your goals to help you segment things. “You might want to focus on certain areas more than others – for example, your email marketing strategy or your list segmentation strategy,” she explains.
Within that, there may be a “specific issue that requires your attention, such as a high bounce rate or low engagement,” says Chekhovska.
Remember, this is not a solo job.
“Even if you’re in a small company, involve others. Besides building collaboration and leveraging others’ skills, involving others helps you discover things you might miss,” says Parisian.
You can also connect your sales and customer service teams to “find out how the tone of voice and content length align with their messages,” adds Parisian.
Marketing strategist Yair Baruchas agrees.
“Lean on additional team members who may have expertise in other areas needed during the audit, such as developers or analytics,” says Baruchas.
Testing Subject Lines for Your Emails
“This isn’t common, but you can try testing subject lines,” says Parisian. The test involves showing someone a subject line and asking them for their opinion on what they think the email will be about.
To eliminate confirmation bias, Parisian recommends not showing the email copy to participants. You can then learn how people truly feel about the subject line without knowing the email content.
Parisian also suggests interviewing customers “in the ‘green’” and considering “integrating them into a beta testing campaign” as another way to test and tailor your emails.
Account for Differences in Strategies and Campaigns
“Every company approaches documentation and email strategy differently, so don’t hesitate to reach out to the client to ask questions,” says Baruchas. He also explains that every audit is unique as well.
So, “flexibility is as important as being timely,” Baruchas clarifies.
Chekhovska also points out the differences in campaigns.
“Don’t measure each email by the same standards,” says Chekhovska. “Consider what you deem success for each of your campaigns – it will be different for your weekly newsletter, for example, and the abandoned cart series.”
Using Quantitative Data and Qualitative Feedback
“For an effective email audit, my advice is to look at quantitative data (open rates and click rates) and qualitative feedback (customer responses),” says Onur Kutlubay, CEO of YouParcel.
With this “holistic” approach, Kutlubay’s company managed to tailor their emails “to increase engagement, leading to higher ROI and increased customer satisfaction,” says Kutlubay.
Kutlubay notes a particular increase in open and click rates. But that’s not all.
“This comprehensive improvement from both quantitative and qualitative angles led to a 25% increase in email-driven revenue, demonstrating that investing in email audits can lead to significant gains,” says Kutlubay.
Removing Inactive Subscribers
Founder James Smith recommends taking a data-driven approach to your strategy, including checking for “any inactive members” on your email list.
“First, remove the inactive people from your list. Then, tailor your content to what your audience loves,” says Smith.
By doing so, you will focus on delivering engaging content.
Source: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/email-marketing-audit
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