An email audit might not sound too fascinating, does it? However, it’s a significant part of being an email marketer or managing an email marketing account. How can you effectively conduct one, and what benefits can you gain from running regular audits?
What is an email audit?
An email audit is an in-depth evaluation of an email program, along with the strategy and resources that support it. The main aim is to uncover problems or technical issues that require resolution. An audit is also the easiest way to identify effective strategies and tactics and those that need improvement. By the end of the audit, you’ll have a clear view of your strategy and opportunities for improvement.
An audit can be compared to a car inspection. If you’re a driver, you know that you need to do it regularly to drive safely and keep your car in good technical condition. It’s probably not your favorite activity of the year, but it’s important for many reasons. Even the most successful email marketers encounter challenges they need to address with audits. When handling several accounts at once, maintaining vigilance can become challenging. An audit is the answer then.
When should you conduct an email audit?
- After taking over an existing account
When you take over a new email marketing account, you need to understand how it performed, identify its weaknesses, and determine what can be easily improved to boost engagement and deliverability. - When supervising a less experienced employee
Someone who has just started their journey in email marketing might need additional guidance and tips on managing accounts. Suggestions for improvements would also be appreciated and audits will give you that. - Every now and then
Once in a while, for example, once a year, it’s a good practice to check the health of your account and look for new ideas. Are there trends you haven’t implemented yet? Have any issues with DMARC occurred? During an audit like this, you can uncover all this information.
What is the goal of an email audit?
An audit, like every action taken in the marketing world, should have a goal. Before conducting it, you need to think about what you want to achieve and what score will be satisfying or concerning for you.
An audit can help you achieve a variety of goals. First, it may help you identify major changes and trends over the course of the year. On the other hand, you might focus on identifying serious technical issues that need to be resolved immediately. An audit can also help you pinpoint the tactics and strategies that work best, which will be useful in planning future emails and campaigns.
If you've been regularly conducting audits and collecting data, comparing the new insights with past audits will be easy. What has changed? What has improved, and what has declined? You'll be able to quickly spot the key differences between compared periods of time.
Regardless of the goal, you will definitely find both opportunities and room for improvement during the audit. Moreover, you can also find some achievements that are worth sharing with your boss or team...
Who might be helpful during an audit or when dealing with the encountered problems?
You can perform a basic audit on your own, but for more advanced details, you may need assistance from other members of the team. For example, programmers can help with DNS-related issues, while graphic designers can offer input on your email templates and styling. If you are not satisfied with the text of your emails or are eager to test new ideas, you might want to talk to a content marketer or copywriter for advice and tips for creative writing.
To see the overall impact of emails and campaigns on your website or e-commerce, you might need to contact your Analytics team, who will gather information about traffic and conversions related to email marketing. If you use UTMs correctly, then that shouldn’t be an issue at all to get valuable reports.
External tools can play a key role in performing a complete audit as well. An email service provider is essential to check, as you would expect. To achieve your email marketing goal of generating more leads, it's important to review the data in your CRM and understand how it connects with your email marketing effort. E-commerce reports will help you track sales driven by your email campaigns.
Tools like Google Analytics 4, or alternatives such as Piwik PRO, can offer insights into what happens after users click on your email links. External tools like Google Postmaster or MXToolbox can also be useful for assessing your domain and email reputation. These resources will help you gather even more valuable data.
What should you look at? What should be considered and checked during an email marketing audit?
Essential metrics
- Checking essential metrics is often the first step when considering an audit or result analysis, and it's a core objective of most of them – enhancing engagement and conversion rate. That’s why it's important to examine the open rate, click rate, unsubscribe rate, and other key metrics. However, you should not only analyze short-term data, such as from the past month, but also compare it with data over a longer period.
That’s the way to look for promising or concerning trends – if you notice that your open rate has been steadily decreasing over the past 6 months, it could mean that something is wrong with your strategy. Did you change your approach to email subjects? Or perhaps you haven’t cleaned your list often enough? There could be many reasons, and an audit will help you identify that you need to investigate them more closely. Remember, results should also be analyzed in relation to your business data. Decreasing open rate metrics shouldn’t be so alarming when, at the same time, revenue generated by emails is growing rapidly.
Technical questions
- During the audit, significant technical questions should also be considered, even if they aren't visible at first glance. Is the domain verified and the default sender set correctly? How many subdomains are involved in sending? Are all crucial records verified, not just SPF and DKIM, but also DMARC and CNAME? It’s also worth reviewing SMTP credentials and API keys during the audit. Do you still need and use all of them, or is it time to delete some? Checking which users and subaccounts are active may also be a good idea to avoid potential data breaches and increase the account security level.
How is your personalization working?
- What about email personalization? Personalized messages significantly increase user engagement, according to research. That’s why it’s important to verify whether personalization is used as frequently and regularly as it should be and to consider other ways to personalize it in future campaigns. Are there any custom fields that could work better? For example, you could create segmentation based on recent purchases to send more relevant emails. Check also if there are any merge fields in your email templates that are outdated - an audit will help you address all mentioned issues.
Looking for the perfect email
- During the audit, you should also pay attention to which emails perform best. Are they promotional emails or educational ones? Are all tactics being used, such as preheaders or clear subject lines? What interactive elements, like GIFs, are included in your campaigns? Analyze the elements of your best-performing emails and try to implement these effective tactics in more of your messages. Even the timing of your emails could matter, providing insights on how to schedule future campaigns.
Is your audience growing steadily?
- Make sure to analyze your audience, too. Track the number of contacts on your lists and how it has changed month by month during the analyzed period of time. Is your audience growing? What are the statuses of your contacts? If you see a decrease in the number of customers, it could be a sign that you need to refine your email marketing strategy or focus more on acquiring new leads.
Email automation checking
- Most marketers use email automation on a daily basis. One of the major advantages of this solution is that a well-designed automation can run for a long time without requiring changes or updates. However, it can also be tricky, as you might forget about some of them or not check them as regularly as you should. This could result in issues with your results, such as a decline in all engagement-related stats. There's also a chance that some of your templates are outdated and need updating as soon as possible. It's important to review all active automations during an audit, including triggers, emails, and results.
In accordance with the law
- Since legal regulations are constantly changing, it can be challenging to stay on top of them. During the audit, you can confirm that your processes for lead collection (such as double opt-in) and unsubscribing are running smoothly and up to date. Be sure to check that your privacy policy and company information in the footer are accurate. Verify that you're complying with relevant regulations like CASL, GDPR, or EU Cookie Law, depending on your country or region.
External tools needed
- With external tools, you can check your sender reputation. For example, configuring Google Postmaster will give you insights into the authentication success rate and the spam rate generated by your domain. During an audit, conduct tests to check how your emails render on different email clients. Check these factors and consider creating additional segments to account for them, adjusting templates for clients like Yahoo or Gmail.
Email audit: summary
To sum up, an email audit might not be your favorite task every year, but it’s definitely worth it. The insights you gain can provide you with many ideas and opportunities for improvement. Even small tweaks can significantly boost your email marketing results and increase generated revenue. During the audit, you can also identify technical or performance issues and address them in time. Also, you can find proof that your current strategy works fine, and your account has apparently improved over the years.
But, even with clear and concise email audit results, remember to test your new ideas and changes! There is always a risk that your new approach and potential improvements might cause more harm than benefit to your crucial metrics. That’s why it is important not only to regularly audit and look for improvement, but also to test those new strategies.
However, we are sure that the knowledge gained from the audit will bear fruit and will clearly influence your email marketing results. So, we hope that you are already planning an email audit for yourself soon.
Filip Blajet
Filip is a marketing specialist at Elastic Email, who spends a lot of time with data and ads. Outside of work, he loves football, binge watching tv series and travelling.
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