"How do you measure email marketing success?" is a bit of a philosophical question since the definition of success varies for each marketer and campaign. Whatever it may mean for you, an email marketing audit is key in ensuring you stay on track of your goals and objectives.
Below, you'll find our email marketing audit checklist to ensure you’re consistently getting the best results from your campaigns.
What is an email marketing audit?
Just like a general digital marketing audit – an email marketing audit is an in-depth assessment of your email campaigns to see what works and what doesn't. This kind of email campaign report reviews the technical aspects of your emails, like deliverability, design and accessibility, but also your campaign success metrics, i.e., open and click-through rates, email conversion rates and sales.
Small to medium businesses typically run their email audits annually. However, if you're a large organization with a big subscriber list and email marketing budget, 2 to 3 times a year would be best.
Why should you conduct an email marketing audit?
Email marketing audits are the essence of healthy, effective email marketing efforts for every company size and industry. Here's why:
- Identifying issues: A successful email marketing audit helps uncover issues like low open rates, high unsubscribe or bounce rates and poor conversions within your email marketing strategy. These metrics can change even if your email campaigns don't, so you need to assess your tactics cyclically.
- Allocating resources more effectively: Once you've pinpointed which strategies work and which don't, you can allocate time, budget and manpower to the most effective ones. Maximizing your resources ultimately leads to your email marketing campaigns' highest possible impact and ROI.
- Optimizing emails for better results: Based on the identified issues, you can optimize for improvement. For example, low engagement rates may indicate the need to redesign your formatting or copywriting. Low email click-through rates require a more urgent call to action. A drop in opens might push you to reassess timing and subject lines. High unsubscribes mean you probably don’t send relevant content, so focus on personalization and bringing more value. We suggest you combine thorough, regular email marketing audits with A/B testing practices to get the most out of your email marketing campaigns.
Conducting an email marketing audit: 5 areas to focus on
Email performance
The easiest way to monitor all your top email metrics is with an email analytics tool. We may seem biased in recommending SEINō for this, but we truly believe it's the best software for this purpose – and our dedicated team is set on keeping it that way.
SEINō gives you near-real-time insights in one reporting view in an email marketing dashboard. It's a highly customizable system you can tailor to your needs, e.g., by setting specific baselines, targets and alerts or customizing the visualization options with filters, charts and more. Here's a short video to illustrate how easy it is to navigate the dashboard and make it work for you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmCl8fN3VF0&ab_channel=SEIN%C5%8D%7CEmailAnalytics
On top of tracking your regular email metrics, this tool also monitors transactional ones, such as the number of transactions, total revenue, average order value and revenue per email sent.
Your top key performance indicators to track depend on your objectives. Before jumping into an analysis, ask yourself – why does the answer matter? What actionable information for improvement does it give you? Without a question in mind, you're likely to get overwhelmed with a ton of numbers that don't make much sense.
With that in mind, these are the top email performance aspects to consider:
- Email marketing KPIs – This includes bounce rates, conversion rates, revenue (overall, per session, per email), session duration, open rates, sent all and unique, AOV, list growth rate, CTR, forwarding rate, complaint rates, email deliverability (more on that later).
- Email workflow – Does each step in your email campaign push customers down the sales funnel? Is your timing effective?
- List health – We have a separate article about email list management you can refer to to ensure your subscriber list includes people who actually want to hear from you. Plus, SEINō includes list monitoring, management and segmentation options that help you get the most out of your client relationships with precise targeting.
Email content
You can use generative AI to save time on analyzing how strong your content is. It's as easy as screenshotting a handful of your emails and prompting AI to do the work for you. You can ask it to identify which Cialdini techniques are used and compare that with the engagement levels achieved.
The main things to consider when assessing email content include:
- The subject line – Track which subject line types get the highest open rate. You'll likely see a trend after a while. If you don't, you can use ChatGPT to help you identify the categories that work best for your target audience, e.g., curiosity, urgency, humor.
- Pre-header text – Ideally, it should be personalized and fit in with the subject (but not repeat the same thing).
- Header – Make it clear and informative, and include your brand logo.
- Email copy – Create short, engaging, grammatically correct text consistent with your branding, offer and values.
- CTAs – Keep it unique, specific and at an absolute maximum of about 5 words. The wording should be action-oriented and the button itself – visible, accessible and with a working link.
- Media – All graphics you use should be light enough to load fast and include alt tags for when they don't. Make sure they're responsive to all devices.
Design
Modern emails aren't just about the text. Most people skim them, so it should be easy to decipher. Plus, good design makes you look professional. An attractive layout is a trusty attention-grabber.
The two key aspects of your design are readability and responsiveness. All elements should be accessible, mobile-friendly and aligned with your branding (logo placement, colors, themes, fonts, images etc.). When in doubt, refer to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) international standard.
Make sure to analyze these elements in your email marketing audit:
- Layout – E.g., single-column, multi-column, borders and components' alignment. We recommend sticking to the left alignment, as it's the most intuitive.
- Branding – This includes all aspects from this list and more (like the voice, tone and topics of your messaging, a footer with your socials, links and buttons). Essentially, you want to stay consistent across all channels.
- Fonts – If you're using web fonts, add a fallback version of a web-safe font just in case your first choice doesn't load for a reader. Stick to a maximum of 2-3 fonts and highlight important information with weight, size or color.
- Logos – Add your logo to the header and signature (in the lossless PNG format, compatible with all email clients). More than that may seem pushy.
- White space – Include enough white space for room to breathe and a good flow by using bullet points, spacious line height, short paragraphs etc., but not too much to avoid appearing sloppy.
- Colors – Opt for branded tones and intensity (tip: high contrast improves readability). You can change color themes for different occasions and campaigns, e.g., Christmas, Halloween or Black Friday deals.
The thing with email design is you don't want to experiment too much or too fast. We still encourage you to A/B test some ideas, but your content should be recognizable at first sight – you don't want to appear confusing or overwhelming, do you?
Here's an example of an email design combining many things we covered – a two-column layout, left-alignment of text, images, clear CTA buttons, white space, colors reflecting the Tripadvisor’s brand logo and a footer with logo and socials (plus, easy unsubscription and preference management options – more on that in a moment).
Deliverability and compliance
We put deliverability and compliance in one pot because they're linked – if you're not compliant with current ESP regulations, your sender reputation (and deliverability) will drop. This also happens when your messaging frequently gets marked as spam.
Here's what to keep an eye on to ensure you reach your audience's inboxes:
- Deliverability issues – If your emails don't successfully reach your subscribers, you might as well not be doing anything. Some aspects affecting deliverability scores are sender reputation, spammy or unprofessional language, unclear or difficult-to-use unsubscribe settings and preference management options.
- Spam complaints – This metric is high when you provide irrelevant content that's not valuable or personalized. Remember that as of 2024 Google requires you to include an intuitive, visible one-click unsubscribe option. It's policy but also just good manners and a method of protecting your sender reputation.
SEINō features alerts you can set up to notify you about worrying situations, like spikes in the email unsubscribe rate or a decrease in deliverability. Since it's easiest to learn by doing, let's go through adding such an alert in the tool together in this demo.
Automation
Automated emails save time only when they work well, so your auditing process should also cover this aspect. Follow our transactional email best practices to create automated emails that are informative, valuable and well-timed. After setting up triggers you should use email testing tools to ensure everything works.
We strongly believe in automating where you can. Chances are – there are processes you can streamline that you're currently doing manually. Take, for instance, data input and analysis. You can connect SEINō with your email service provider to pull all information automatically instead of copying and pasting it.
You don't have to take our word for it, though. One of our clients, Glanbia (a global sports supplement seller), reports saving 16 hours weekly on getting real-time insights and e-commerce data mapping. Because SEINō does that for them, their email marketing team has plenty of time (and creative energy) to focus on segment analysis, personalization and A/B testing, which is a much better use of time than manual data entry.
Conclusion
Wondering what to do next after completing your comprehensive email marketing report? The assessment likely exposed areas needing urgent improvement – deal with those first. You may have also found potential for smaller, quick wins, like making the layout more readable or adjusting your subject lines to the target audience.
Is your goal to help the entire email marketing team become more efficient, and your campaigns reach their maximum impact potential? In that case, SEINō is a valuable addition to your marketing toolset. It monitors your email strategy daily so you can react to alarming situations in your campaign before they cause costly damage.
Learn more about SEINō or book a demo to see how to improve your email marketing practices and get 2.5x ROI with fast testing and optimizing.
Email marketing audit: FAQ
What should be included in an email audit? A comprehensive email marketing audit checklist should include these aspects:
1. Email performance
2. Content
3. Design
4. Deliverability and compliance
5. Automation
How do I create an email audit? Since an email marketing audit involves looking into campaign data, it's easiest to do with an email analytics tool. SEINō makes it easy for you, as it creates visual information representations that are easy to analyze. You can automate other aspects of assessing your email campaign's performance with the generative AI tips mentioned in the article.
What does an email audit look like? An email marketing audit goes beyond analyzing KPIs – it includes reviewing content, design, compliance with regulations, list segmentation strategy and automation workflows. You can organize it in a spreadsheet for convenience.
What is the purpose of an email audit? In essence, email marketing audits help optimize email marketing strategies to make them the most effective – relevant for subscribers and profitable for organizations.
