Email marketing provides you with an opportunity to earn a 4400% revenue on the expenses made. But, unfortunately, due to the significant number of variables involved, you’re also “drinking from the firehose,” as the saying goes.
Maintaining a solid sender reputation and achieving sky-high deliverability and conversion rates require keeping an eye on the success of your email campaigns. If your campaign metrics aren’t performing up to your expectations and you want to level up your email marketing, an audit is an excellent place to start.
In this post, I’ll show you how to conduct a quick email audit and why you should do so.
What Is The Purpose Of An Email Marketing Audit
An email audit is a detailed investigation that aids in determining the efficacy of the processes pursued by email marketing. In other words, it will enable you to determine what works effectively in your email routine, and identify and eliminate any flaws.
Email audits can be conducted by your staff or by a third party, depending on the complexities and level of expertise needed. Based on the results, you can make improvements in your operations and the way you approach emails. This includes everything right from your email templates to send times. Thus, it is an exercise to eliminate the hurdles in increasing your ROI.
Primary Areas To Keep In Mind When Doing An Email Marketing Audit
The following is a list of issues that an email audit may help you pinpoint and treat:
- Security. Check to see that you have all of the basic settings in place to ensure the secure transfer of information and the quality of your mailing list.
- Reputation. Count the amount of soft and hard bounces, spam complaints, and your blacklist status to see if your sender reputation is good.
- Deliverability. Check to see if your emails end up in subscribers’ principal folders or if they never make it to their inboxes at all.
- Effectiveness. Check to see if your efforts are generating the desired revenue, email openings, and CTA clicks.
- Content Quality. Determine if the subject line and preheader of your emails generate opens and clicks and also whether the actual content of your emails is sufficiently engaging.
List Of Steps To Remember
Here’s what you should look for to ensure that your campaign is ready to run. Let’s get this party started.
Step 1: Examine The Content Production Process
Understanding your process and determining how your emails are generated from concept to manifestation is the first step in performing an email marketing audit. Here’s what you should be looking into at this point:
- Keep track of who is involved in the creation of your email campaign and how long it takes.
- The ‘From:’ field is a mandatory field. This line should include your company’s URL and the sender’s email address so that users know from whom they are hearing.
- The preheader and the topic line. Limit your subject line to 60-70 characters, optimize it, and link it to the preheader so that it makes sense and provides more information about the email’s content.
- Structure of an email. Ensure that your email has three sections: a header, a body, and a footer.
- A call to action is issued. Limit the number of CTAs to two, and make sure the call to action is a button that encourages subscribers to do a specific action, such as buying your product or signing up for your newsletters.
- Images. Keep an eye on the images: alt text should be encoded in case the real picture fails to load.
Step 2: Look Into The Infrastructure
The technical side of your email comes next, which includes the following elements:
- The IP address reputation. You may utilize a variety of services and reports to learn more about your reputation, such as sender score calculators and blacklist checking tools, as well as tools that display how subscribers evaluate your emails.
- Emails with hyperlinks. Check that the links in your email are genuine and current, that the unsubscribe button allows people to opt-out, and that the sharing buttons truly share or send your information. Make sure there are no truncated links in your email.
- Deliverability. Determine whether you have any challenges with deliverability, such as hard and soft bouncing or encountering spam traps.
- DNS. Because your Domain Name Service is the foundation of your email marketing, it must always be proper for your emails to have a good sender score and avoid domain hijacking or phishing attempts.
- Authentication. Check that your SPF records are correct, that your emails are validated using DKIM records, and that your DMARC settings reflect how your domain handles suspicious emails.
Step 3: Develop An Improvement Strategy
Make the following modifications to enhance your email marketing strategy, depending on the source of the issues:
- Content for emails: Prepare an A/B testing hypothesis. Different topic lines, sender names, and CTA design and placement should all be tested.
- Infrastructure for email: Remember to focus on the technical aspect of your campaigns once you’ve improved the content of your emails.
If you discover any authentication errors, check your email service provider’s settings or contact their support staff. Make sure to clean your email list and delete bouncing addresses, verify your blacklist status, and decrease spam trap hits to improve your sender reputation.
To avoid your emails being marked as spam, provide consumers with a simple method to unsubscribe. In the footer of your email, provide an unsubscribe button and double-check that the link connects to the unsubscribe form.
Summing Up
Run a quick audit before hitting the send button to confirm that your email is error-free. Then, preview the message and send a test email to identify any possible formatting issues in your email template, non-working links, or incorrectly placed snippets. Remember how the email sending mechanism works, and don’t forget to do a technical check and minimize your sending time.
Author: Kevin George is the head of marketing at Email Uplers, that specializes in crafting Professional Email Templates, PSD to Email conversion, and Mailchimp Templates. Kevin loves gadgets, bikes & jazz, and he breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on email marketing blog.