What’s the goal?
Before you start looking at data and metrics, ask yourself: What’s the point of email marketing for me? What am I trying to achieve? What do I want to get out of it? What is my goal?
(and btw, each email should have it’s own goal, keep that in mind too)
Because numbers & data, whatever they are, only mean something in context.
Once you have an anchor of what you want to achieve with your email marketing (this could be different for different audience groups btw), then you can start looking at your data to see if it does the job.
Audit elements to look at
Open rate:
The % of people that open your email.
Note the rates for different types of campaigns. To understand why some emails are opened more than others, look at:
subject lines
day of the week
time of day
Click-through rate:
The % of people that click on something among those that open your email.
Look at these things:
What is being clicked?
Who clicks?
Are there any trends and patterns?
Do any campaigns stand out?
Subscribers:
Looking at your audience pool, take note of this:
Are there many inactive subscribers?
Do you have groups, segments, or tags?
How many bounces do you have on each campaign?
How many people unsubscribe from each campaign?
Automation:
I am going to assume you have at least the automated welcome email for new subscribers that you can review.
Is it up to date?
Is the subject line relevant?
Have you tried running an AB test?
For sequences, have you tried different timings?
And you don’t have any automation set up, ask yourself if this is in line with the business objectives you outlined at the start.
Design:
Are your email campaigns consistently designed? They don’t need to be identical, but need to look uniform and represent your brand so that your audience recognise it.
This applies to forms, landing pages, emails, buttons, all confirmation emails and messages that they see. Colours, fonts, styles, formatting, and tone of voice need to be on brand and consistent.
Also look at your use of images, gifs, emojis. Do they work as intended? Are there too many? Images are only meant to be an addition to the content.
Tone of voice:
Tone of voice is so important that I want to call it out separately.
How you communicate is really important in conveying the right message to your audience.
For example, in greeting:
Is your greeting “Hi”, “Hey”, “Hello”, “Dear”?
Do you use the first name?
Do you call your audience “friend”, “mate”, “fellow golfer”, etc?
Do you have a greeting at all?
Likewise, in sign-off and throughout the content, what kind of language do you use?
Content:
To audit your content, you need to distance yourself from it and look at it objectively. We like the things we create, but it’s time to be brutally honest.
What’s the value to the audience? What’s the value to you?
Think about your audience's pain points and how you address them with your business - does your email content align with that?
Are you sending a lot of different messages in one email?
Can you segment and personalise your content for your audience groups and preferences more?
Domain
Go to your domain & email settings and make sure that:
The domain you are sending from is verified and authenticated
The email or emails you are sending from are verified and authenticated
These settings are crucial to ensuring your emails get delivered to your audience and are not flagged as spam behind your back.
Your email provider will have instructions on how to update your DSN records and verify the domain. These will vary depending on where you host.
Put it together
Once you’ve taken note of it all, measure it against the business goals you set out above, and then measure it against industry averages and statistics.
What’s the verdict? Is your email working for you?
Want to discuss the results of your audit?
My calendar is open for a free email consultation or an open Q&A: https://calendly.com/maria-malaniia/30min
Maria Malaniia
email marketing for nice people with small businesses