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.
To successfully run an email marketing audit, you must focus on auditing the following areas:
1-Marketing Goals and Company Values
Reviewing your goals and company values is the most important part of the auditing process. This ensures the content and messages you create and send to your audience are consistent with your company values and goals. An email campaign without a clear goal might as well be an email campaign without a proper plan. If you don’t know the objectives you’re trying to obtain, you can’t organize the right set of emails with pertinent information to achieve your goals.
2-Email Schedule and Creation Process
The other area to establish is the process it takes to create an email campaign and the content that goes into it. For example, how do you create the email, how long does it take, do you write it, or do you hire someone else to do it? Are there areas that I can improve on, or would it be more efficient to hire someone to take over? These are important questions and places to look over to ensure your return on investment is worth it. It also helps ensure your process is efficient, consistent, and clear enough for your audience to follow along long term.
3-Key Performance Indicators
An important area for the auditing process is looking at your key performance indicators or KPIs. It is easy to get lost and start developing campaigns that don’t produce the results you need if you don’t keep track and review your key performance metrics. KPIs are the details that help gauge your performance. Together they provide tools and resources that show how well your content is doing amongst your subscribers.
The metrics you want to have easily available and keep track of during the email auditing process include:
- Bounce Rate
- Open Rate
- Click-Through Rate
- Opens by Device
- Unsubscribe Rate
- New Subscribers or List Growth Rate
- Revenue Per Subscriber
- Revenue Per Email
Understanding what these metrics mean and what you can do to improve is crucial to the auditing process. Without it, you won’t craft a detailed plan to improve and enhance your strategy to accomplish your goals.
4-Email Campaigns, Infrastructure, and Content Quality
The structure and quality of your email and other content such as lead magnets and opt-in forms are important to organize and perfect to better communicate and convert your readers into loyal customers. You need to have a proper title that hooks them in and end with a clear call-to-action that makes them hard to say no or not click-through. The design of your content, such as color, brand message, and image, needs to be consistent between all campaigns to improve your messaging and communication further.
5-List Segmentation Organization
Demographics, new subscribers, unsubscribes, engagement type, satisfaction level, purchases, spending habits, new customers, and old customers are a few areas to analyze and evaluate. The differences in numbers will tell you that you are either doing something right or wrong and where you can adjust. For example, your unsubscribe rate seems high, you might have them in too many lists, or the information you send targets the wrong people.
6-Email Service Provider
Does your email service provider have what you need to successfully send and receive emails to your target audience? Do they have the features you need to grow your business? This is important as it can be hard to switch platforms as you grow, and deliverability is vital. So be sure you start with and work with an email service provider that provides the features you need for long-term success, such as mobile-friendly templates, free or low-cost image storage, and, most importantly, access to analytics and key performance metrics.
It’s important to do these periodic audits to have your email marketing working for you. Now that you understand the key areas of focus during the email marketing audit process, you can dive further into the process and steps required to run a successful audit in the full “Guide to Email Marketing Audits” here: https://iaplifecoaches.org/email-marketing-audits/
