The Complete Email Marketing Audit Checklist

Introduction

Email marketing continues to be one of the most productive, if not the most productive, digital marketing channels available for generating engagement with customers, driving conversion of customers, and ultimately bringing in revenue. But the more you tweak and optimise your email campaigns, the better they will perform over time. The best way to do this is through an email marketing audit. Being diligent about auditing your email marketing campaigns regularly can provide you with helpful information so you can improve your email strategy and improve your results. 

 

In this blog, we will provide an overview of what an email marketing audit means, why one is needed, and describe the different types of audits and how to conduct a thorough audit to ensure your email marketing is at its best.

What is an email marketing audit?

An email marketing audit is the process of evaluating your email campaigns to assess their effectiveness, identify weaknesses, and ensure you’re following best practices. An audit involves reviewing everything from your email list to your design, content, deliverability, and performance metrics. By conducting an email audit, you’ll be able to identify gaps and opportunities for improvement, which will help refine your strategy and improve the overall success of your campaigns.

Why Conduct an Email Marketing Audit?

Before diving into the specifics of how to perform an audit, it’s important to understand why it’s so critical. Here are several reasons why you should regularly audit your email marketing, especially in the context of overall digital marketing strategies:

1. Improve Deliverability

One of the most common challenges email marketers face is deliverability. Your email might look perfect, but if it doesn’t make it to your recipients’ inboxes, all your effort is wasted. An audit helps identify and resolve issues that could be affecting deliverability, such as sender reputation or the use of spammy words in your subject lines.

2. Increase Engagement

An email marketing audit helps assess how well your emails resonate with your audience. By examining open rates, click-through rates (CTR), and other engagement metrics, you can identify patterns and tweak your content to make it more compelling and relevant to your subscribers.

3. Optimize Conversion Rates

At the end of the day, the goal of email marketing is to drive conversions. Whether it’s sales, leads, or other desired actions, audits help uncover areas where you may be losing potential customers in the email journey. This allows you to optimize your emails for better conversion rates.

4. Stay Compliant with Regulations

With evolving data privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA, ensuring your email campaigns comply with these rules is essential. Regular audits help you stay up to date with any compliance issues that could result in fines or damage to your reputation.

5. Identify Areas for Automation

Automation is one of the most powerful tools in email marketing, allowing you to send relevant messages at the right time without manual intervention. An email audit helps identify opportunities for automation, such as triggered emails or drip campaigns, that can enhance your marketing efficiency.

Types of Email Audits

There isn’t just one type of email marketing audit. To get a full picture of your email campaign performance, you should consider several different types of audits, each focusing on a specific area of your email marketing efforts.

1. Performance Audit

A performance audit focuses on evaluating the effectiveness of your email content and design. Key elements to review in a performance audit include:

• Subject Lines: Are your subject lines catchy and attention-grabbing? Are they relevant to the content inside the email? Your subject lines should entice recipients to open the email without being misleading.
• Email Copy: The body of your email should be engaging, concise, and clear. It should include a strong call to action (CTA) and be easy to read. Assess whether your copy is aligned with your audience’s needs and if it’s driving action.
• Images and Visuals: Are your images optimised for both desktop and mobile devices? Are they relevant and compelling? Too many images can slow down your email load times, while too few can make your email look sparse or unprofessional.
• CTAs: Do your emails have clear and actionable CTAs? Are they strategically placed to drive the desired actions? A good CTA should be visually distinct, actionable, and relevant to the content of the email.
• A/B Testing: Regularly conducting A/B tests on subject lines, copy, and CTAs helps optimise performance. An audit can identify gaps in your testing strategy and suggest areas for improvement.

2. Accessibility Audit

Email accessibility is critical to ensuring that your emails can be read by as many people as possible, including those with disabilities. This includes checking:

• Text Contrast: Ensure that the text in your email has enough contrast against the background, making it legible for people with visual impairments.
• Alt Text for Images: Add descriptive alt text to images, which allows screen readers to describe the images to visually impaired subscribers.
• Mobile Optimisation: Over half of emails are opened on mobile devices. Ensure your emails are responsive, meaning they adjust to fit different screen sizes.

3. Deliverability Audit

Deliverability is one of the most important factors in email marketing success. An email deliverability audit focuses on identifying issues that might be causing your emails to land in the spam folder instead of the inbox. Key areas to check include:

• Sender Reputation: Is your sender reputation healthy? You can check your reputation through tools like Sender Score, which scores your sending reputation based on various factors such as spam complaints, bounces, and engagement.
• Spam Traps: Spam traps are email addresses set up to catch spammers. If your emails are being flagged as spam, it could be due to your email list quality or poor list management.
• Blacklist checks: ensure that your sending domain and IP address are not listed on email blacklists, which could significantly impact your deliverability.
• Authentication Records: Verify that your domain has proper email authentication records in place, including SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail). These help ensure your emails are properly authenticated.

4. Design Audit

Your email design should be visually appealing, functional, and aligned with your brand identity. A design audit involves reviewing the overall look and feel of your emails, including:

• Responsive Design: Ensure that your email adapts to different screen sizes and devices (desktop, tablet, mobile).
• Brand Consistency: Does your email design align with your brand’s colour scheme, fonts, and other visual elements? Consistent branding helps build recognition and trust with your audience.
• Clarity and simplicity: Ensure that your emails aren’t cluttered. Your design should support the content and guide recipients toward your CTA without overwhelming them.

5. Code Audit

The code audit focuses on the technical side of your email campaigns. Ensuring that your email code is clean and compatible with different email clients (Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, etc.) is crucial for rendering your email correctly. Consider checking for:

• HTML/CSS Compatibility: Ensure your email is built using responsive HTML and CSS that works across different email clients and devices.
• Broken Links and Images: Make sure all links work correctly and that images are hosted properly so they display in the email.
• Email Load Time: Optimizing your code for faster load times can improve engagement and reduce bounce rates.

6. Compliance Audit

With data privacy regulations becoming stricter worldwide, it’s crucial to ensure that your email marketing practices are compliant with laws like GDPR, CCPA, and CAN-SPAM. A compliance audit helps ensure that your email campaigns:

 

• Include clear opt-in and opt-out options.
• Be transparent about how you collect and store data.
• Follow rules about email consent and subscription management.

7. Automation Audit

Automation is a powerful tool in email marketing, allowing you to send timely, relevant messages without manual intervention. An automation audit looks at the effectiveness of your automated emails, such as welcome emails, drip campaigns, and abandoned cart reminders. It involves:

• Reviewing Workflow Triggers: Are the right emails being triggered at the right times?
• Email Segmentation: Are you segmenting your audience appropriately to ensure that your automated emails are relevant?
• Personalisation: Are your automated emails personalised based on the recipient’s behaviour and preferences?

How to Conduct an Email Marketing Audit

Now that you understand the types of email marketing audits, let’s break down the steps involved in conducting one:

 

1. Set Clear Goals: Before starting the audit, define what you want to achieve. Are you looking to improve deliverability? Increase open rates? Enhance user experience? Setting clear goals will guide your audit process.
2. Review Your Email List: Clean your email list by removing inactive subscribers, invalid emails, and duplicates. A healthy list is key to improving deliverability and engagement.
3. Evaluate key metrics: analyse performance metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, and conversions. Identify patterns in these metrics to uncover opportunities for improvement.
4. Examine Your Email Content: Review your subject lines, copy, images, CTAs, and overall design. Are they aligned with your audience’s needs and preferences? Are there any obvious issues, such as broken links or poor formatting?
5. Check technical aspects: Test your email on different devices and email clients to ensure compatibility. Check your email authentication settings and sender reputation.
6. Test and Iterate: Use A/B testing to experiment with different subject lines, content, and designs. Continuously iterate and optimise based on the results.

Conclusion

An email marketing audit is a powerful tool for improving your campaigns and ensuring that you’re making the most of your email marketing efforts. By regularly auditing your campaigns, you can identify issues, optimise your strategy, and ultimately increase engagement, conversions, and revenue.

Whether you’re focusing on performance, deliverability, design, or automation, a comprehensive audit will help you stay on track and maintain a successful email marketing program. So, don’t wait for issues to arise—conduct regular audits and keep your email marketing campaigns running at their best!