How to Do an Email Marketing Audit: 7 Steps + Free Template

Email marketing is here to stay as a core part of any successful marketing strategy. Your business needs to leverage email marketing to gain and maintain growth both in the short and long term. In fact, 87% of businesses say that email marketing is very critical to their success.

But if you’re not sure whether your email campaigns are effective in growing your business, you’re not alone. It can be tricky to pinpoint the performance of your email marketing—which is why email marketing audits can be such an invaluable exercise for any business looking to expand its success.

Today, we’ll give you everything you need to conduct your own email marketing audit and, as a result, see increased email marketing ROI.

Contents

• What is an email marketing audit?
• Why are email marketing audits important?
• What should you include in an email marketing audit?
• How to do an email marketing audit
• Email marketing audit template

What is an email marketing audit?

An email marketing audit is an evaluation of your business’s email promotion strategy. Email marketing audits look at the performance of email campaigns and how they’re working as a marketing channel for your business.

📧 Get everything you need for a stand-out email marketing strategy with our free email marketing toolkit complete with templates, tips, subject line ideas, and more!

Why are email marketing audits important?

Email marketing audits are key to understanding whether your current email promotions are effective or not. It also allows you to take a holistic view of your email marketing strategy to ensure you’re providing a seamless brand experience for your audience. Consider these statistics:

• 37% of businesses are increasing their email budget this year.
• Segmented emails drive 30% more open rates and 50% more clicks through to a landing page than unsegmented ones.
• Businesses that practice email quality assurance, A/B testing, and spam testing see a 28% higher marketing ROI.
• Over 14% of all emails go missing or have been caught by spam filters.

These statistics highlight that, as email marketing competition continues to grow, it’s important to audit your strategy so that you can organize and test your emails for maximized success.

What to include in an email marketing audit?

What you include in your email marketing audit will depend on your business’s overall goals and objectives. However, a strong email marketing audit will look at the following pieces of your strategy:

• Your email lists and targeting strategy
• Your email campaign creative designs
• Your email campaign copy and subject lines
• Analysis of competitor emails
• Email key performance indicators (KPIs) like open rates, conversion rates, unsubscribe rates, etc.

Depending on the type of email marketing audit you focus on, you may have more or less included than the list above. These are just a few guidelines to ensure your email marketing audit is thorough enough to be effective.

How to do an email marketing audit

Use the following email marketing audit steps to guide you through the process.

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1. Define your goals

As you begin your email marketing audit, decide the purpose your emails should be serving so your audit has direction. It can be helpful to use SMART (specific, measurable, time-bound, achievable) structured goals to start off your audit.

2. Decide your areas of focus

Once you know your goals, it will help you know what type of email marketing audit you should zero in on. For example, if one of your goals is brand awareness, you might do a more design-oriented email marketing audit to ensure your emails align with your business’s branding.

3. Incorporate email audit tools

See what email audit tools you may need to leverage. For example, you may need to incorporate a customer relationship management (CRM) system to help you audit and organize your email list segments. Another example would be using a generative AI tool for brainstorming email subject line ideas to test based on your audit.

4. Map out your email lists

Gather an understanding of who you’re sending to so you can get a sense for where you may need to adjust your email frequency or messaging. Try mapping out your target market’s demographics to see if your email campaigns align with your customers’ needs, wants, and beliefs.

5. Take inventory of your performance data

Time to audit your email campaign performance! Take into account key email metrics and how they compare to your ideal benchmarks. Leverage any reporting dashboards you may have available and select a timeframe that matches with the start of your most recent email campaigns to pull the data as accurately as possible.

6. Decide on action items and next steps

At this point in your audit, you should have an idea of what you want to prioritize and improve on. You may want to use a marketing calendar during this step in your email audit to make a game plan for new email tests.

Our free marketing calendar can help you pinpoint any important dates you should frame upcoming emails around.

7. Check performance to measure your audit’s success

Congratulations! Your email marketing audit is complete. However, the work doesn’t stop there. Be sure to follow up on your audit with regularly scheduled check-ins to track how you’re pacing towards success. You might even want to revisit your audit process and work email marketing audits into your regular routine!

Email marketing audit template

Looking for a free email marketing audit template that’s easy to use and customizable? Look no further than our Google Sheets email marketing audit template here!

Get a head start on your own email marketing audit

You have the steps, you have the template, now all you need to do is start your own email marketing audit. Regularly auditing your email campaign is well worth the work, and it can save your emails from ending up in spam or trash folders.

If you embark on your email marketing audit journey but could use more help, see how our solutions can help you maximize your business’s email marketing success in both the short and long term!

Here are the steps to an email marketing audit:

1. Define your goals
2. Decide your areas of focus
3. Incorporate email audit tools
4. Map out your email lists
5. Take inventory of your performance data
6. Decide on action items and next steps
7. Check performance regularly to measure your audit’s success