A Practical Guide to Conducting an Email Audit: Tips You Need to Know

Email marketing is a powerful tool that can have far-reaching results when used correctly. However, trends are constantly changing, and to ensure your marketing strategy is effective, it’s important to review it regularly. 

These reviews are designed to identify problem areas, effective measures, and elements that require improvement.

If you’re looking to learn more about email audits, you’ve come to the right place. This article will provide a comprehensive guide on how to conduct such an audit to improve your marketing strategy and your company as a whole.

What is an email audit? 

An email audit is essentially a report that sms promotional campaign provides a comprehensive assessment of the “health” of your existing email campaigns over a period of time.

The goal of a good email audit is to note the company’s goals and objectives and determine the best way forward based on the information you gain. It also generates comprehensive analytics for marketers. This data can help them design and implement more effective email marketing campaigns. 

An email audit can reveal flaws and errors in your campaigns as well as strengths in your company’s overall performance, allowing you to address issues and improve future results. It will also help you build more meaningful relationships with potential customers and increase traffic to your website.

It’s important not to confuse email audits with email marketing. While the latter is the process of sending emails to existing and potential customers to promote products, deals, or services, audits take the metrics data of your campaigns and process them to identify possible flaws and areas for improvement.

There are three main types of email auditing. They are as follows:

  • Strategic Audits. An effective strategic email audit ensures consistency by evaluating email communications for alignment with business objectives.
  • Compliance audits. These email audits ensure compliance with laws and industry standards, protect companies from data breaches and ensure correct data handling.
  • Technical audits. To improve functionality, technical audits focus on email infrastructure, examining things like deliverability, server performance, and data security.

Ideally, you want your email audit to combine all three types.

A step-by-step guide to conducting an email audit

Now that you have a good understanding of what email audits are and why you use them, it’s time to talk about how you can leverage this powerful tool to get the most out of your email marketing campaigns.

Step 1: Planning and Preparation

Like is chaty pro the best wordpress chat plugin for you? (review) most things in life, it’s always good to go in with a plan. The truth is, email audits can be tedious and overwhelming, so it’s best to break it down into clear and achievable steps first.

In this step, you need to select the type of audit you want to conduct. You can choose one of the above types or a combination.

Next, write down your project goals and what you hope to achieve. This will provide clear guidance on what to look for when you conduct the audit. It is also helpful to have a grasp of company goals during this process and use them to define project goals.

Want to learn more about tools for successful email marketing? Read 9 Best Email Marketing Tools for Small Business .

Step 2: Gather the data and tools needed to conduct the audit

Once you have a direction, it’s time to gather the tools and data you’ll need. You don’t need any fancy software for this. A simple spreadsheet will do. To set it up, you should consider adding a few headings:

  • Campaign Name
  • Email Subject Line
  • Target audience
  • Unsubscribe Rate
  • Click-through rate (CTR)
  • Open rate

You can get this information using data from marketing team members and your email marketing tools . Once you’ve done that, collect the information and use it to populate your spreadsheet.

Step 3: Conduct an Email Audit

Once you’ve categorized the information in your spreadsheet, analyze it and compare it to industry benchmarks, previous success rate results, and marketing campaign goals to determine if your marketing strategy is successful.

This will help you understand snbd host how your campaign compares to other similar campaigns and help you identify problem areas and aspects that are working well.

If you are doing a technical audit, you will want to look at things like authentication protocols, feedback loops, SMTP servers, and DNS records.

If you’re conducting a strategic audit, you should also look for changes in subscriber lists, customer engagement, sales data, etc. to understand how effective your email marketing campaigns are.

Be sure to compare this data to your company’s project goals and expectations.

Step 4: Identify potential compliance issues and legal considerations 

You also need to check that your email marketing campaigns comply with legal standards. This is an important part of the process as it can help prevent legal consequences and protect your company from unnecessary costs that may arise from non-compliance.

Don’t just check the applicable laws and regulations, but also the terms and conditions of the service providers the company uses. Violations can have serious consequences and get the company banned, so be sure to do a thorough investigation.

If you find any potential issues, make a note of them so they can be included in the report you will generate in the next step.

Step 5: Actionable recommendations and reports

Once you have verified legal compliance, it’s time to take a close look at your data and really dig into the heart of the matter. Review all the metrics and data you collect and identify activities that differ from industry standards due to significant differences in metrics.  

Ask questions to determine whether the overall results of the campaign were positive or poor. Consider various aspects such as the send time, subject line, and various other elements and determine which one can be held accountable for the performance of the marketing campaign.

Be sure to review the emails and take note of how they would appear to you if you were the end user.

Write up your findings and use them to create a report that includes your recommendations that the company can implement to address these issues and improve future campaigns.

Once you are confident that you have covered all the important aspects of the event, refine your information into a presentation and/or report that you can show to your stakeholders.

Step 6: Summarize the key findings and recommendations from your email audit

If you need to share your findings and recommendations with management or stakeholders, be sure to prepare a summary, comprehensive report detailing your results. You can add charts and graphs to make the report more appealing and prove your point.

It’s also a good idea to include a strong demo that you can use in the next step.

Step 7: Submit report to stakeholders and obtain approval to implement recommendations

The final step is to present your findings to management. Be sure to mention key metrics and how the campaign performed compared to past campaigns and industry standards. You will also need to highlight any compliance issues and ensure that comprehensive solutions are provided to stakeholders in the good interest of the company.

Summarize

Well, there you have it! By following these steps, you can conduct a comprehensive email audit that will help you identify problem areas, compliance issues, and more. Using this information, you can better plan future email marketing campaigns to ensure your company’s success.

If you’re looking to optimize your email marketing strategy and increase your website’s conversion rate, then you need to try Poptin to collect leads from your website through attractive popups, forms, and more.

Scroll to Top