Email Marketing Audits – Assess, Plan, Execute

There’s nothing better than seeing your email marketing campaigns convert into sugary-sweet ROI. But before we take your business forward into the bright, bright future, we need to analyze what has been working and what hasn’t. And an initial email marketing audit is your first step on the journey to success. What is an email marketing audit? What are the benefits of having your email marketing audited? We have all the answers… and more!

i'm ready
Creative

What Is a Marketing Audit?

Essentially, a marketing audit is a step-by-step evaluation of all your business’s marketing elements and practices. We take your existing email marketing program into our lab and, after swirling some test tubes and nodding to each other, we can ascertain where you’re lacking some of that crucial zing. Our team pays close attention to your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to see which emails yielded a higher conversion rate, and which ones caused a spike in unsubscribe rates. We also focus on deliverability to make sure your emails aren’t ending up in spam folders. There are a million little pitfalls that could be robbing you of revenue, and an audit is the first step toward getting rid of them.

What Makes For A Good Email Marketing Audit

When it comes to great email marketing, experience is everything. And as a team of email experts with multiple decades (collectively) spent working solely in this field, we put our experience to good use when conducting our initial audit on your business’ email program. Oftentimes, we can even identify your problem at a glance because we’ve seen it before and know exactly where to go. We also have the ability to spot things that are invisible to the inexperienced eye, as well as find potential issues and stop them before they can negatively impact your business. What’s more, by carefully assessing all your existing email campaigns, workflows, lists, and segments as well as doing a deep data dive, we’ll get a better understanding of what’s already effective and what can be improved upon in order to optimize your email marketing program.

tell me more

Here’s what our initial email marketing audit covers:

Benchmarks

Having been around the block for so long watching small brands grow into household names and bigger brands become true juggernauts, we have the ability to tell you at a glance whether something is working or not.

Strategy Analysis

When you’re on the inside, it’s hard to see any potential speed bumps or roadblocks. Having an outside view as well as loads of experience in the field, allows us to analyze your existing strategy and provide solid guidance on your email program going forward and even your business plan as a whole if necessary.

Layout Analysis

Sometimes the best strategy, content and design can still fail if you don’t stick to some key benchmarks of email design. One of the many best practices we check for is that all images in your emails are clickable. It might sound simple but it’s something that can have a big impact and is often overlooked. Like this, there are dozens of factors we look at that are all-too-often overlooked.

Content And Design

We are known for our dazzling, impactful design work and we recognize how much of a difference good design (and great content) can make. Sometimes, all you need is a slightly smaller logo, or a catchier subject line to start making the kind of profits you want. Sometimes, you need a lot more love, but we’ll get you there anyway.

Open Rates

This shows how engaged your audience is and whether they appreciate receiving your current content. If your open rates are lower than average, we’ll assess your subject lines, send times and sending frequency to help us determine the cause. There’s so much that goes into judging an open rate beyond looking at benchmarks and industry, so we take a really close look at what’s been working and where.

Click Rates

Once a customer has opened your email, you want to know that they’re actually clicking on the CTA and visiting your site. Of course, the more site visits you have the more sales you’re going to make. At the same time, certain emails are not supposed to be the money-makers, so there’s a lot more to judging this one too.

Send Days And Times

Every audience is different. Gaining a good understanding of when your subscribers are most responsive (in terms of both open and click rates) allows for optimized scheduling of all email campaigns and SMS campaigns alike.

Unsubscribe Rates

Often, the hard part isn’t getting new customers, it’s keeping those customers interested – and your unsubscribe rates low. The good news is, if your unsubscribes are above average, we’ve got a whole list of ways to fix the problem.

Now let’s focus on one of the most important tools in email marketing - automation. These are workflows that are set up to send automatically throughout each point of the customer’s buying journey. When done right, these automated flows will do most of the heavy lifting for you. If not given enough time and attention, they could be doing more damage to your ROI than you realize.

Let’s explore…

Auditing Your Email Marketing Workflows

When they’re done right, automated email workflows not only generate a lot of income but also make the day-to-day running of your business so much easier. We’ll go through a few of the main ones out there, including:

Flows

We’ll assess these to ensure that your welcome, cart abandonment, and browse abandonment flows are as effective as they can be (and if they’re not, we’ll identify how we can improve them). These are just a handful of the ones you could and should build. Here’s a brief overview of each flow:

Transactionals

Unless you want to email each customer yourself to confirm an order, transactionals offer a simple way to save yourself time and money. We’ll make sure that all transactional emails like order confirmations, shipping reminders, and delivery notifications are all up and running, in order to help you communicate with your customers.

Anti-Spam Laws

Your GDPR/CASL/CCPA/LGDP legal compliance all needs to be in place – this isn’t just important, it’s mandatory. And for good reason - these legal requirements are designed to protect you and your customers from questionable emails. So, while some might roll their eyes at compliance, we see it as a great way to ensure that customers receive quality, trusted content.

Let’s Do It!

The world of email marketing is intricate and tricky to navigate. It can overwhelm anyone, from seasoned entrepreneurs to new business owners. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Our team of dedicated experts is here to guide you through every step of the process, from doing an email marketing audit on your existing campaigns to building the kind of email marketing program that will help you create the business of your dreams.

Here’s what you can expect from us after your initial audit:

  • A comprehensive email calendar and strategy to ensure your messaging is in sync with your audience’s preferences.
  • Automated flows to ensure that each customer feels valued at every step of their journey.
  • Breathtaking copy, design, and coding. Seriously, we’ve hired the best in the biz from all over the world. See for yourself here.
  • Extensive testing and monitoring to make sure that everything we do works for you and your customers.
  • We report everything back to you and advise on the next steps.

So, ensure your seats are in the correct and upright position, fasten your seat belts, and prepare for lift-off…

Request an Audit

Some FAQ's

A marketing audit is a step-by-step evaluation of all your business’s existing marketing elements, campaigns, and practices. It’s a litmus test to ascertain what’s working, what needs improvement, and how your business’s marketing is performing as a whole. If you’re using an Email Service Provider (ESP), our experts can do some serious digging and look at Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), cross-reference those with campaigns, and also see when customers unsubscribed. Of course, we’ll also pay close attention to those campaigns that had a good click-through rate. The saying goes, “You can’t improve what you don’t measure”. Well, this is the first step toward giving your marketing a boost in the upward direction.

Imagine a football team without a coach. Each game they run out onto the field and simply give 110%. Except there’s no one to analyze the game, look at the team’s strategy, or plan their next play. This is what you’re doing with your email marketing if you don’t do an audit. Yes, your emails look great, but they could be sitting in spam folders or boring subscribers without you knowing. With an email marketing audit, you get a clear insight into both your own campaign’s performance and - more importantly - your audience’s preferences. Perhaps your subscribers simply don’t read emails at the time you send them. Maybe they don’t like getting three emails a day? All these questions can be answered (and corrected) by taking a closer look at the instant replay and listening to your coach.