Introduction
Marketing using email has been shown to be the most effective and budget-friendly way to communicate to your target audience. Businesses can expect to see around forty-two dollars in return for every email marketing dollar spent.
What’s more surprising is that, according to OptinMonster.com, email marketing produces more sales than social media marketing, with 60% of consumers reporting purchasing due to a promotional email, compared to just 12.5% from a social media ad.
But, while email marketing is powerful, you can’t expect the magic to work without proper review. So I recommend you perform routine email marketing audits.
An email marketing audit is the process of reviewing your content, infrastructure, goals, marketing process, deliverability, and performance to ensure you are on the right path to running a successful campaign. They’re essential!
Top benefits to performing an email marketing audit:
- Increase Return on Investment
- Improve Brand Awareness and Company Message
- Ensure Proper Deliverability
- Refine Content Quality
- Create Loyal Customers
Throughout this guide, you will dive into everything required to run a successful email marketing audit, including tips, tricks, and tools.
Seven Steps to Conducting an Effective Email Marketing Audit
Step One: Inspect Your Content Creation Process
The first step is to develop the right timeline, and collect the resources you need. Inspect your content creation process from start to finish—from brainstorming and creating the lead magnet (or acquisition process), to writing the lead magnet sales copy and the follow-up email series.
When you review your content writing, take a moment to answer the following questions:
- Does the process take too long?
- Are there parts of the process that are too hard for you?
- Are there parts of the process that could be refined?
- Am I taking advantage of tools and other resources?
- What are the costs associated with your email creation process? For example, who writes the content, and are they the best for the job? Or if you are buying PLR content, are you spending more than you are making from it?
This step of the email marketing audit is important in order to be sure you are using your time and resources efficiently. If you are spending too much time on creating content, you won’t see the right return on investment.
Step Two: Analyze Your Email Marketing Goals
Start by answering the following questions:
- Look at your current email campaigns. What are their immediate goals? (e.g., a specific number of sales)
- What’s the time frame for the goals?
- Do these goals align with your company message and values?
Allowing time to answer these questions ensures that your campaigns, opt-ins, email copy, and landing pages accomplish your marketing goals. To further ensure your goals are aligned, take a moment to create a list of your most important email marketing goals. Then review your campaigns again and organize them accordingly.
Step Three: Examine Your Email Campaigns and Sequences
For step three, you want to be sure you have finished writing your email sequences (or series) and have the right content to achieve your campaign goals. Here are some questions to think about:
- Does your landing page copy align with your email copy? (You wouldn’t believe how many people don’t do this!)
- Do you have a call-to-action or landing page that would align more with a different campaign?
Step Four: Evaluate Your Email Structure, Design, and Content Quality
Each email you send should include the following (in this order):
- Sender name
- Proper subject line
- Pre-header and summary (optional)
- Body header (optional)
- Clear and direct content
- Call-to-action
- Graphics or other visual content (optional)
- Branding
- Unsubscribe options
- Other contact methods
Make any necessary changes.
Step Five: Analyze Your List Segmentation
Next, you want to look into how and to whom these campaigns are being sent. Each new subscriber must be following along the right customer journey. If they make a purchase, do they go into a different list or stay in the current one?
This helps to ensure that you are properly communicating across the buyers’ journey. For example, you don’t want a welcome email sent to someone who has been making purchases—something that can easily happen if proper settings are not put in place.
Or, if you are relaunching a product, you don’t want to offer it again to previous purchasers.
Step Six: Review Your Key Performance Metrics
Finally, you want to review the information you have accumulated through this process and compare it to your analytics. This way, you can see both your strengths and weaknesses along the way and make a better decision when planning or restructuring your email marketing strategy.
Take the time to go through email marketing audit steps one through five first without looking at your metrics. Then when you start step six, return and review the previous steps to highlight any areas you may not have noticed before.
Here are the metrics you should keep track of and ways to improve each, in order to run a more successful email marketing campaign:
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is calculated when someone visits a single page on your website and does nothing on the page before leaving. But it can also be the rate at which the readers’ internet service provider is rejecting your email. Your bounce rate goes up if the email never made it to their email box. The optimal bounce rate is around 26-40%. If it’s not, then you need to look at the deliverability and security of your email service provider. Also, using double opt-in forms can help reduce your bounce rate. Read more about bounce rates here.
Open Rate
The average open rate is around 21%, but it is important to note that a high open rate does not always translate to success or high revenue. Therefore, you should always use this metric in addition to others to get a proper overview. Perfecting your subject lines and your sending schedules are keys to increasing your open rate.
Click-Through Rate
The average click-through rate for many businesses is around 2.5%. This is the rate that your readers click the link within your email. Providing high-value deals they can’t say no to, and understanding your customers’ every need and problem are clear ways to increase your click-through rate. If you have what your readers need at a fair price, they will likely click through.
Unsubscribe Rate
A good unsubscribe rate is around 0.2-.5%. While this is not something you would like to see, having a high unsubscribe rate can sometimes be good. These people are giving you free feedback. Either they’re telling you that you are marketing to the wrong audience, or that the expectations from your opt-in or lead magnet are not being met.
They are letting you know what you need to do to improve. For example, if your opt-in rate is high, but your click-through rate is low, and your unsubscribe rate is high, you are likely not meeting expectations. They are interested in the content, but the value you provide is not there, or you are not solving the problem that they have.
List Growth Rate
The list growth rate is exactly the opposite of your unsubscribe rate. Most industries see about an average of 3.2% per month. Anything above this shows your content and goals are running successfully. Using multiple sign-up forms, discount codes, hosting giveaways and contests, and developing useful content are ways to improve your list growth. Calculate yours here.
Opens According to Device
There is no average benchmark needed for this metric. The purpose is to allow you to see how your readers interact with your content. This way, you can optimize the device they use, such as a smartphone. For example, if you see that many of your readers open the email on their smartphone, you must use an email service provider that has mobile-friendly options. Improving the way the content is shown and used on your readers’ devices will likely increase your open and click-through rates as they are easier to use.
Revenue Earned Per Subscriber and Email
This is the return on investment you have received for each email or subscriber before expenses. To determine your revenue earned per email, take the earned revenue and divide it by the number of emails you sent. Likewise, to determine revenue earned per subscriber, take the revenue earned from email and divide it by the number of subscribers.
For example, let’s say campaign A received $16,000 in revenue and acquired 20 subscribers. Each subscriber received four emails totaling eighty emails being sent during the full campaign.
To determine the revenue earned per email, the formula would read:
Total Revenue Earned divided by Total Emails Sent = Revenue Earned Per Email or $16,000/80 = $200
To determine the revenue earned per subscriber, the formula would read:
Revenue Earned Per Email divided by Total Number of Subscribers =
Revenue Earned Per Subscriber or $200/20 = $10
For this campaign, this means that each subscriber is roughly worth $10 before expenses. Because you can see exactly who is purchasing your products, getting a breakdown per email and subscriber gives you a glance at how profitable your campaign is.
Step Seven: Plan, Test, and Repeat
Now that you know what is working and not working with your email campaigns, you can start determining what needs to be done, if anything, to see better results. You can implement testing of your changes and determine if you want to keep them around long term. Then after some time you can repeat the audit process again to ensure the changes you made are seeing the results you were hoping for.
As you can see, conducting an email marketing audit is time-consuming. There are many pieces to the puzzle, depending on your niche and goals. However, the benefits and results once the process is finished are worth the work. In addition, there are many other tools and tips you can implement to streamline better and perfect the process.
Seven Email Marketing Audit Tools to Use
You can run successful email campaigns using only an email service provider. However, if your business is growing fast enough to handle the investment, there are more tools available that can help, support, and/or automate the emailing processes.
Here are 7 of the most popular email marketing and auditing tools to streamline the email auditing process:
Discover what you need to run a successful email marketing campaign with Emercury audit tools, competition analysis, KPI setup, and list growth strategies. Then, seamlessly bring in leads and start them on a targeted automated messaging system and watch their behaviors to get a deeper understanding of how your audience interacts with your content.
#2: Litmus
Get clear insights and data from the metrics that matter most to your email marketing goals and strategies. Litmus will send you insights and information at a glance to make a quick and more informed decision along your email marketing journey. In addition, the features provided from list segmentation to personalization make it easier to see what needs to be done to run a more effective email campaign.
This tool will give you a comprehensive email audit in just five minutes. Running your email campaigns through Mayple allows you to discover the key areas producing you the most results, what you are missing to improve your open and click-through rates, and other personalized recommendations to improve your overall email marketing conversions.
#4: Campaign Monitor
A global technology company that provides email marketing and automation tools to more than 250,000 customers. These tools are well designed and crafted to make lasting impressions on your audience to form more loyal customers.
#5: Omni Send
Boost sales, improve your list segmentation, and add SMS messaging to your marketing strategy with Omni Send. An email marketing platform designed for those with eCommerce business. Its mission is to send highly targeted and tailored emails to your customers to increase your sales and success as an e-commerce business. Develop on-brand emails and evaluate the AI-driven customer analytics to capture and convert new subscribers and learn what is working right for you.
ConvertKit has every single thing you need to run a successful email marketing campaign. Creating landing pages, sign-up forms, and develop beautiful emails all in one platform. You can even set well-targeted email automation and track your analytics to ensure you keep achieving your email marketing goals. In addition, emails sent with ConvertKit have a higher delivery and open rate as they implement features to safeguard your content so that it never makes it into your audience’s spam folders.
#7: SendPulse
Advertised as an all-in-one communication platform, SendPulse will connect to your target audience on the platform they prefer in one easy place for you to communicate. Communicate through email campaigns, text messages, direct messages from social media platforms, and even browser notifications. Trigger and automate emails and keep track of important metrics to grow your subscriptions. SendPulse also offers segmentation, A/B testing, and personalization features and tools, all-important for successful email marketing.
As you can see, many tools can help guide you through the email marketing process and give you the tools and data needed to run a more effective audit. With the high return on investment seen on average, there is no reason for you to avoid investing in these tools to further perfect your conversions and develop a more loyal audience through email marketing.
Conclusion
Now that you have learned how important email marketing is and understand more about how to audit your email marketing processes, you can really start making a difference with your actions.
Don’t neglect your email marketing content, strategy, or your audience any longer. Use this guide to ensure you have everything you need to perform an effective email marketing audit. Email marketing is highly profitable as long as it is done right and monitored effectively.
DOWNLOAD the PDF version of the Guide, Workbook, and Checklist HERE.
