Running an email marketing audit

How effective are your email campaigns? Is there an underlying strategy or have you fallen into a pattern of emailing cooked up many years ago on the back of an envelope.

If you’re not sure on these points and you think there are improvements to be had, it might be time to put your campaigns under the microscope and to run an audit of your email marketing activity. Here’s how.

Deliverability

One in five email campaigns are blocked, bounce, or find their way into the promotions or spam categories in recipients' emails. There are many factors that influence deliverability, and you can improve your chances of hitting inboxes by considering the following.

Firstly, in this world of GDPR, you need an opt-in form on your site making it clear they are subscribing. You should look at the timing of your email delivery, and the content in your emails (more on that below).

Spam filtering algorithms also look at the ratio of active to inactive email accounts so if you are mailing to a large number of addresses that seem to be abandoned or irregularly used, this is a red flag to spam filters. To prevent this, universities should proactively clean up email lists at regular intervals to extract subscribers who rarely engage with campaigns.

Other factors that should be considered are including an ‘unsubscribe’ link, having an official address, avoiding spam trigger words, and ensuring the structure of the email follows best practice.

Subject Lines

A well crafted subject line convinces recipients to open an email and is your chance to stand out in a crowded inbox.

You can use audit software to check the length of subject lines. Desktop browsers typically display 60 characters, mobile browsers between 25-30. You can cross check your characters with device usage for your audience and tailor accordingly.

Next, you can analyse the subject line wording to ensure it’s succinct, relevant, and does not misrepresent the content of the email.

Email Content

Once your email has been opened, you’re relying on the content you develop to get across your points, engage people and persuade them to take further action. To analyse your past campaigns, you can review the best and least performing emails to see what characteristics there are in the content. Are there patterns, flaws, tweaks that are needed? Is the tone right for the audience and consistent across campaigns? Do communications flow to create a coherent thread across messages? There are all useful to consider.

Frequency

This really depends on your industry, audiences and purpose for communicating via email, but the frequence certainly affects open rates. Sending too many can frustrate and drive up unsubscribe rates. Sending too few means you won’t be on their radar enough to be spotted and opened. You can run testing to analyse how different frequencies affect open rates, unsubscribing patterns, and click throughs. Alternatively you could let the user select their frequency preferences.

Your email audit doesn’t need to be overly onerous, but taking into account the factors we’ve outlined above can set you ahead of competitors. On the subject of competitors, you can obviously review their activity by signing up to their campaigns and reviewing what they’re doing periodically.

Trends come and go, but email marketing has stood the test of time. If your approach has become stagnant and dated, take an audit and dive into a new approach.