A comprehensive evaluation of the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns is essential to ensure if your email marketing initiatives are worth their cost. Such email marketing audits will reveal what works for you in your email marketing processes and what does not.
Email marketing audits assist you in identifying problems in your email marketing campaigns and help to resolve them amicably. Either an external marketing agency hired by you or your existing internal marketing team can conduct the email marketing audits to estimate if your email marketing efforts are performing well as expected.
Delegating your Email Deliverability Audit to a professional agency will make your email marketing campaigns achieve expected results.
First and foremost, you must have an email marketing audit checklist to ensure the effective performance of your email marketing campaigns. Here are the important audit aspects that you need to focus on.
A Checklist For Managing Email Campaigns Effectively
1. Security
Security is highly significant, and your recipients must think that your marketing emails are safe to read. And it is your responsibility to make sure that the emails you send to your prospects are safe and secure.
Some of the concerns that you must focus on to ensure the security of your email marketing campaigns are:
- The database that you work from must be a clean and up-to-date one with good segmentation.
- Your platform of choice needs to be a reliable and reputed one with strict security practices.
- Ensure that the platform has any significant technical and process changes due to any recent system upgrade.
- The platform you use to send your marketing emails must ensure privacy for any sensitive information you may send to your recipients.
- The DNS must be correct for forwarding/reverse lookups.
- Your mailing lists must have the necessary access privileges and be protected properly.
- The embedded links in your email marketing campaigns must direct to landing pages with necessary encryption.
If you do not ensure safety to your customers, the emails you send them may end up in the junk folders, without ever opening at all!
Email marketing infrastructure plays a crucial role in ensuring that your marketing emails are delivered and opened. The physical and technological setup of your organization matters. DNS, authentication, IP reputation, reply and response addresses, standardized links are critical. Use of appropriate tools, detailed checking, and periodic up-gradation is significant. Employee training needs attention also.
2. Deliverability and openability
The email marketers’ responsibility is to make sure that the emails they send have a high degree of deliverability. The below checklist will help to achieve desired deliverability for your email marketing campaigns:
- Compliance with spam laws existing in the geographic regions that you operate is necessary. For example, CAN-SPAM for the USA and Spam Act for Australia.
- An easily visible and working unsubscribe link is warranted in your emails.
- The provision of a valid physical address helps credibility.
- Listing your company name as the sender’s name makes your marketing emails sound genuine.
- Email subject line must be a relevant one with an appropriate description without misleading the recipients.
- It is good to avoid explicit and overt marketing terms like SALE, FREE, BUY, etc.
- Time zone considerations are necessary to set proper sending time to your global customers. Emails received at midnight are less welcome and have fewer chances of being opened and read.
3. Quality Content and Conversion Rate
Quality content enhances the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.
- The subject line and the body text of your emails should match.
- Including a logo in the email helps branding.
- Original, informative, brief, and Relevant email copy with attention-grabbing first para. Bullet points and short paragraphs improve readability.
- Clear call to action improves conversion rates. Make sure the CTA URL is correct and working.
- Links to social media like Facebook, Linked In, etc., helps customer engagement and conversion.
4. Tracking and Measurement
Tracking your email campaign performance and modifying them will help manage your email marketing campaigns effectively.
- Open rate, click-through rate, and conversion rates are some of the important parameters to watch out for. Good click-through rates but not so good conversions imply ineffective landing pages.
- The said rates must be analyzed in light of email frequency and sending time.
- Unsubscribe rate and the reasons behind it need attention.
- Low open rates warrant A/B testing with different subject lines.
5. Email Workflow and Process
A prevailing misconception is that email marketing audits start after rolling out the email marketing campaigns. But the email audit process must begin at the stage of email marketing strategy formulation itself.
Here are a set of questions that you need to address:
- What is the extent of transformation from a marketing idea to a full-fledged email marketing campaign implementation?
- Do we have proper workflow documentation?
- Are the different phases of the existing processes identified?
- Who is responsible for which processes, and what are their responsibilities?
Workflow analysis assists you in identifying inefficiencies and process streamlining. In addition, it facilitates optimum utilization of valuable resources such as finance, time, technology, tools, and personnel.
Final Thoughts
Email marketing audits help you identify campaign pitfalls such as high bounce rates, low click-through rates, high unopened rates, etc. An ineffective campaign may invite even risk of reputation to your company.
The audit checklist presented in this article helps you ensure that your email marketing campaigns reach out to the right audience with the right message at the right time, luring the recipients to take favourable action.
