Suppose the company already uses email marketing at the first stage of building a strategy. In that case, it is necessary to analyze the work done and draw lessons from it, leaving effective “chips” and tools and removing what did not meet expectations. An email marketing audit will allow us to avoid repeating earlier mistakes.
Who may need to conduct an email marketing audit:
- An email marketer who has taken on a project that is new to them. Whether it’s an agency employee or an in-house professional taking over the business doesn’t matter.
- At a company that is just planning to implement email. Even if there have been no newsletters before, evaluating the market, audience, the possibility of subscription forms for the site, data transfer, and strategy for promotion in this channel is necessary.
- Those marketers and companies have conducted mailings before but have yet to get their desired results. The audit will tell you whether changing the strategy or goals is necessary.
Analysis from a Mailing List Service
When we send mailings through an exceptional service, it becomes much easier to analyze marketing data. We can immediately assess how well the emails are delivered, track the dynamics of opening and click-through rates, and understand what part of the email the user liked the most.
In mailing services, we usually receive information about emails with errors and can remove all invalid emails from the general database (or collect them in a separate document to try to make another mailing later).
We can also evaluate a mailing list’s main email marketing metrics: Open Rate, CTR, and CTOR. We’ve talked more about these metrics in this article. Evaluating these metrics requires a marketer to assess how well the audience accepted the email adequately.
A low email open rate can indicate several problems:
- If the low rate happened once, the reason is most likely a topic that subscribers are not interested in.
- If the drop in opens was sharp and stayed at the same level, then the reason may be the low deliverability of emails (getting into spam).
- If there is a gradual decrease in open rates, then you need to check the validity and activity of the base; perhaps there is an aging base, or you need to select more exciting topics and the wrong timing.
- You need to segment your base to give your audience relevant content that will interest them. I agree that if you sell products for children and send letters to parents of girls about guns and cars, the result will not be good.
It is worth noting that there is no perfect index. It should be understood that for each niche and a particular company, a certain number is formed by experience.
Database Indicators
The composition of the base helps to assess the quality of delivery of mailings to the Inbox: what % of contacts can be covered by Postmaster statistics, and what mailers prevail in the base. This is indicative because some mailers have their specifics: Gmail is quite sensitive to the behavior of subscribers, and it is undesirable to lower the level of mailing list views to below 10%.
In mailing lists and analytics services, we look at the indicators:
- the current size of the subscriber base;
- the number of active and inactive – for example, do not open emails for more than half a year;
- base growth – the average number of new subscribers per month;
- conversion to subscription – the ratio of growth and traffic coming to the site for individual forms and all methods of subscription in the aggregate;
- churn – the average number of losses due to unsubscribes, spam complaints, and technical delivery failures (hard bounce);
- the ratio of growth and churn – how favorable it is for email marketing development (it is good when the growth exceeds the churn by 1.5-2 times).
Now, let’s move on to services that help with email marketing audits.
Key Tools for an Effective Email Marketing Audit
These audits help identify areas where your emails may be falling short, whether it’s in design, content, deliverability, or overall strategy. By using specialized tools, you can gain deeper insights into the performance of your campaigns and make data-driven decisions to optimize results. Below, we explore some of the most effective tools available for conducting a thorough email marketing audit.
Litmus
LitmusLitmus is an all-in-one email marketing platform that allows you to create, personalize, test, validate, and analyze emails. One of the most important features of the Litmus blog that makes us follow its updates closely is organizing research and collecting verified email marketing statistics across the industry. Litmus authors also keep track of all the news and trends and are among the first to share them on the blog pages. Litmus also provides detailed reports to help identify weaknesses in your campaigns, whether they are design, content, or deliverability issues.
Selzy
Selzy is a service that combines ease of use with robust tools for conducting a comprehensive Selzy email marketing audit. It allows you to quickly and efficiently analyze your campaigns, identify deliverability issues, and optimize newsletter content. Additionally, the Selzy provides actionable recommendations for improving all aspects of your email marketing, significantly enhancing the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Mailgun
The service offers a complete cloud-based email service to send, receive, and track emails from your websites and apps. Mailgun’s intelligent inbound routing and storage lets you know exactly where your emails go.
Mailgun is a set of email integration APIs built for developers. It supports all the most popular languages, including PHP, Python, Ruby, C #, and Java. Tracking and analytics features, including A/B testing, allow you to track all emails and increase their chances of avoiding spam filters and reaching inboxes.
With this service, you can analyze how well your emails reach your target audience and get recommendations to improve deliverability rates.
SendGrid
SendGrid is a platform that will improve transactional mailings and scale to solve email marketing challenges. It offers flexible web and SMTP APIs and can easily integrate with any cloud infrastructure. SendGrid supports various frameworks, languages, and applications.
SendGrid features:
- SMTP service.
- Custom API integrations.
- Tracking of opens and clicks.
- Message templates.
- Opt-out tracking.
- Reputation Monitoring.
SendGrid allows you to do a comprehensive audit and identify potential problems in your email strategy. Also, the service provides recommendations on how to improve metrics to help make your mailings more effective.
Performance Results
Start from your KPIs and determine the place of email marketing in this picture so you remember to overestimate (or underestimate) your expectations.
What you’ll get at the end of your email marketing audit:
- An analytical document parsing your value proposition, the needs of all target audience segments, and the business goals and objectives of email marketing.
- Recommendations for collecting a contact base and segmenting it.
- Recommendations for managing audience engagement.
- Recommendations for reactivating customers.
- Recommendations for generating first and repeat sales.
- Recommendations for optimizing email templates.
- Recommendations on information occasions.
- Media plan for sending newsletters.
- List of metrics for managing email marketing effectiveness.
A very important indicator is the share of email among other channels. If the revenue from mailing lists is only a few percent, there is room to grow. And if it’s a reasonably profitable channel, with a share of 20 percent or more – then you shouldn’t wonder why revenue from mailing lists has stopped growing exponentially.
Conclusion
An email marketing audit is necessary to keep your mailing lists at a high level of effectiveness. Using services like Litmus, Mailgun, SendGrid, and Selzy, you can comprehensively analyze your campaigns and optimize them for better results.
