Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to market your product and business. And if done strategically email marketing can be one of the most cost-effective campaigns. The emails are meant to engage and interest your audience and excite clients.
However, most of the time marketers are not sure about their email campaigns and struggle to find the right way to run an email marketing campaign. The solution for it is an “email audit”.
Running an email audit is one of the most effective ways to find out the loopholes in your campaign which is why it is always recommended to get an audit done from time to time.
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What is an email marketing audit?
Email audit is a step-by-step process that helps in the evaluation of the effectiveness of the email marketing campaign. All in all, it helps you in identifying any shortcomings in the marketing process and figuring out what is working for you and improving the overall process.
The audit can be either internal or external. You can either run an email audit on your own or hire a third party to perform the audit for you.
7 Tips to Run a Successful Email Audit
1. Identify your email marketing campaign
Before even planning to measure your email marketing efforts you must determine your goals. You must know whether your goals are to generate website traffic. Do you want to turn leads into loyal customers? Or do you want to increase the list of subscribers?
Without identifying your goals and creating an effective marketing strategy that is aimed at achieving the goals the entire campaign is a waste of time and effort. But make sure the email marketing goals must be specific and quantifiable.
2. Keep a track of the data that represents your goals
Most of the time marketers devote their entire time to tracking the basic email metrics without even considering their goals. Look for metrics that can help in tracking these goals.
With so many options available for tracking it is important to monitor the effectiveness of your campaign through these metrics, the updates in the metrics, and how they are helping you to achieve your goals. The analytics and strategies can further help you in optimizing the emails and fulfilling the purpose.
Make sure the email has CTAs like subscribe to our blogs or join us for a weekly email list etc. Along with that you also need metrics to track the list of subscribers and their growth rate and the click-through rate for CTAs.
3. Know your audience, and segment, and personalize
Do you know that still there 40% of emails that are not sent to the target audience? Email list segmentation is the key that can help you in sending the right content to the right audience which ultimately helps in improving the engagement.
In addition to that, the segmentation must be relevant to the goals and marketing strategies. As per the content of your emails the important criteria while segmenting the mails is to consider the industry, location, purpose, and seniority level.
While it takes time to segment your email effectively the entire process increases the effectiveness of the email and is more effective.
4. Keep engaged subscribers while removing the rest
Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach out to your subscribers. It is important to keep your focus on unengaged subscribers too and remove them. Undoubtedly, you have worked really hard to create a list of email contacts and subscribers list and you might be in a dilemma whether or not to remove these subscribers, however, removing the unengaged subscribers is the right thing to do.
Moreover, sending emails to people who are not opening or engaging at all with your emails can also largely affect your sender score.
It is important to grow your email lists however, it is also important to remove inactive subscribers.
5. A/B Testing- Test your emails
Using A/B testing is the most effective way to test your email strategies. You can get creative with the emails and send unique subject lines, pre-headers, and sensing times and days and CTAs can help in providing valuable details about your audience and their email responses. It can also tell you about the most beneficial ways of promotions.
6. Improve your email templates
Investing in one mobile-optimized and professional email template can help you in many ways. Since mobile users are increasing every day so it is very important to design your email in a way that is mobile-friendly. A template that is not mobile-friendly will not only lose the interest of your audience but will also distract your audience from the content and branding.
It is good to invest in mobile responsive and branded templates that can bring a cleaner and more professional look to your emails.
7. Spam-free emails
One of the most important points to keep in mind is to never mislead your audience. Therefore, you must keep your focus on the subject line and it is very important to not use spam-linked and the subject line which must be catchy. Make sure it is professional yet appealing and do not over-stuff it with words. The spam filters are designed to pick up such words moreover it is not appealing for the customers too.
Reasons to Audit your Campaign
An email audit can help marketers in identifying the areas that need their attention and improve the overall email marketing campaign.
Therefore, in order to figure out whether an email strategy is aligned to meet up with your business goals running an email audit is essential. Here are some of the most common reasons to run an audit for your campaign.
- Check if you have got the important settings to ensure the transfer of safe information and the quality of the mailing list.
- Check the sender’s reputation is appropriate by identifying the number of bounces, spam complaints, and blacklist status.
- See if the sent emails are received in the primary folder or never make it up to the subscriber’s inbox.
- Keep a track of the campaign and check if it brings the desirable revenue and improves the ROI or not, email and CTAs clicks.
- Identify if the subject line and preheader can bring sufficient clicks and whether the content is engaging for the subscribers.
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