Running email campaigns for your online store but want better results? An email marketing audit will pinpoint your winning tactics and uncover missed sales opportunities.
Your subscribers’ needs and behaviors evolve constantly, requiring strategic adjustments to keep your campaigns relevant and engaging over time.
Omnisend simplifies this process by providing in-depth analytics, deliverability monitoring, and cross-channel performance insights. From open rates to list health, each element reveals opportunities to improve your email marketing performance.
Join us below to learn how to conduct an email marketing audit, analyze your campaigns, and implement proven optimization strategies.
Get started with Omnisend for complete insights into your email performance
Email marketing audits review and compare campaign performance to identify both winning strategies and areas for improvement
Analytics reveal where customers engage most and least across email flows
List monitoring catches deliverability issues before they damage sender reputation
Design and template assessments expose flaws impacting subscriber engagement
Automation analysis reveals if message timing, content, and sequences drive purchases or lose customers at each step
Compliance checks maintain proper permission and privacy standards
Multi-channel insights (e.g., data from both email and SMS) help determine the optimal channel and timing for different segments
Testing validates improvements before full deployment
What is an email marketing audit?
An email marketing audit breaks down each element of your campaigns — from subscriber engagement to automation workflows — to uncover actionable growth opportunities.
Your email audits reveal which campaigns successfully convert subscribers into customers and drive the most revenue from your audience. Additionally, they reveal which campaigns and automations aren’t working and are costing you money.
A clear picture emerges of which messages resonate or need adjustment, giving you the data you need to improve your email marketing strategy.
Performance metrics, list quality, content effectiveness, deliverability status, and automation workflows provide insights for improving customer engagement and sales.
Regular assessment of open rates, click-throughs, and purchase behaviors exposes trends in customer preferences before they impact your bottom line.
Each audit offers a chance to eliminate waste, focus on what works, and build a lean, profitable email program that drives results.
The benefits of email marketing audits
Regular email marketing audits help you cut waste and transform underperforming campaigns into revenue drivers. Let’s explore six key benefits that impact your bottom line:
1. Better open rates, click-through rates, and sales
Performance audits pinpoint where your campaigns fall short and spotlight your most significant opportunities. Your open rates, click-throughs, and conversions reveal which elements need attention.
You can use that data to eliminate guesswork and optimize your templates, messaging, offers, and send times for better results.
2. Finding what resonates with your audience
Email delivery suffers when internet service providers flag your sending patterns as suspicious. Regular audits expose sending mistakes that trigger spam filters before they permanently damage your sender reputation.
Metrics like bounce rates and spam complaints help maintain the pristine sending history that inbox providers demand. Understanding these technical delivery factors ensures your campaigns consistently reach interested subscribers.
3. Improved engagement and deliverability
Domain reputation directly affects inbox placement rates across different providers. Technical barriers often prevent messages from reaching even highly engaged subscribers.
Spam triggers explain why high-performing templates suddenly lose effectiveness. Server reputation impacts how different email clients prioritize message delivery.
4. Seeing the big picture and refocusing goals
Email audits reveal where your marketing goals and business results have drifted apart. Measuring campaign impact against key business metrics helps you see which strategies support company growth.
Performance data helps you adjust email programs as markets change and customer behavior evolves. Focusing on business results ensures your email marketing drives sales and growth instead of collecting opens and clicks.
5. Improving email list health
Regular list cleaning prevents your campaigns from reaching uninterested subscribers who damage deliverability. Segmentation based on engagement levels helps you identify which portions of your list need attention or removal.
Clean lists mean higher engagement rates, as your messages reach only those subscribers who want to hear from you. Strategic re-engagement messages focused on the right segments help recover valuable customers before they’re lost.
6. Prioritizing and nurturing relationships
Deeper insights from email audits reveal perfect moments to strengthen customer connections. Your subscribers signal when they’re ready for deeper engagement through their response patterns.
Once you understand these patterns, you can target subscribers with personalized offers that enhance loyalty. Rich customer preference data transforms routine marketing into powerful, personalized conversations that resonate.
Key components of an email marketing audit
An effective audit examines five core areas that determine email marketing success:
1. Performance metrics
While individual metrics might appear healthy in isolation, comparing them reveals crucial patterns in your email program. Here’s what each metric tells you about subscriber engagement:
Open rates show how many subscribers find your subject lines compelling enough to read further
Click-through rates indicate which content grabs attention enough for subscribers to want more information
Conversion rates reveal whether that interest turned into valuable actions like purchases or signups
Bounce rates alert you to list quality issues — hard bounces indicate outdated subscriber data, while soft bounces may signal temporary delivery problems
Each performance metric builds upon the last to show where subscribers drop off in your campaigns. You can audit these individually to discover problem areas and combine them with segments, sending times, and content types to reveal deeper patterns.
This analysis pinpoints problematic emails that damage your deliverability, such as invalid addresses, typos, and disposable accounts.
Using these insights, you can make informed decisions about cleaning inactive contacts and retaining valuable subscribers to build a more profitable list.
3. Content and design review
Your templates and copy need regular auditing to reveal the design issues driving low engagement and high unsubscribe rates.
The most common issues include inconsistent typography, harsh color schemes, poorly written copy, low-quality images, and broken elements.
However, your audit could uncover a more specific problem, such as CTA buttons hidden between text blocks and links that don’t lead anywhere.
Privacy regulations, including GDPR and CAN-SPAM, require explicit opt-in consent and clear unsubscribe options in every marketing message. Honor data privacy requests and keep detailed records of consent.
5. Automation and workflow evaluation
Your automation workflows drive significant revenue opportunities and need regular optimization. Begin examining trigger timing, message sequencing, and conversion patterns across welcome series, abandoned cart recovery, and post-purchase campaigns.
Each automated sequence should intelligently respond to customer actions, sending targeted follow-ups based on their engagement and purchase history.
Review workflow decision paths and segmentation rules to ensure messages adapt to subscriber behaviors. Performance data often exposes gaps between automated messages where additional touchpoints could recover lost sales.
How to conduct an email marketing audit
A structured approach to auditing your email marketing starts with clear objectives and measurable targets. Here’s how to conduct an email marketing audit in nine steps:
1. Define your scope and set goals
Define your email marketing goals in terms of sales targets and customer retention. List what metrics will show if you’re progressing, such as cart recovery rate, repeat purchase frequency, building your list, or increased website traffic.
Match your email performance targets to your business objectives, whether that’s selling more to existing customers or converting first-time buyers. Each goal needs clear success measures.
2. Build your audit team
Identify who manages each part of your email marketing, from creating campaigns to monitoring deliverability to analyzing results. Ensure each key function has someone who can speak to what’s working and what isn’t.
Include anyone whose work affects or depends on email performance, like your web team or customer service. Their insights often reveal issues and opportunities.
3. Choose an audit tool
Select an email marketing platform that provides comprehensive data collection and analytics across campaigns, automations, and customer behavior.
Omnisend’s reporting tools track essential metrics from revenue per email to list health, with detailed breakdowns of deliverability, engagement rates, and automation performance.
The platform’s individual campaign analysis reveals granular insights, such as 24-hour performance trends, device usage patterns, and click maps that show where subscribers engage with your content.
Track every aspect of your email marketing performance with Omnisend
Gather six months of performance data across all campaign types to establish reliable benchmarks and trends. Pull metrics from your email platform, integration tools, and analytics systems for a complete picture.
Review your data collection and storage practices against current privacy regulations to ensure compliance and maintain trust in your communications.
5. List the areas you want to audit
Create a structured evaluation framework covering campaign performance, list quality, and technical setup.
Examine automation workflows, segmentation strategies, and content effectiveness across different subscriber groups. Include deliverability metrics, compliance practices, and integration performance in your assessment scope.
6. Assess impact using email marketing metrics
Compare open rates, click-throughs, and conversion metrics across campaign types and subscriber segments.
Analyze key performance indicators against industry benchmarks, such as the automated emails driving 37% of sales from just 2% of email volume, along with your historical data. Use the metrics in your email marketing tool to identify your most and least effective campaigns and automated messages.
7. A/B testing and optimization
Focus your testing on the elements your audit revealed need improvement, including email design, subject lines, deliverability, customer engagement, and sales conversion. Your test goals should directly address the performance gaps you found.
Design clear A/B tests to evaluate potential solutions, keeping test variables distinct and measurable. Prioritize testing key elements like:
Subject lines and preview text
Offer presentation and messaging
Sending times and frequency
Email design elements (layout, colors, imagery, and CTA placement)
Transform your comprehensive audit findings into a prioritized list of improvements based on potential impact and implementation effort.
Outline changes and measurable outcomes needed for each critical area, from template updates to workflow adjustments. Set clear timelines, track milestones, and assign responsibility for each action item to different specialized teams.
9. Implement an action plan and analyze your results
Implement your action plan and track the results against your defined success metrics. Document the impact of each implemented change on your key objectives and identify what’s driving improvements.
Use these insights to guide ongoing optimization, strengthen your email marketing strategy, and create a data-driven foundation for your next round of email marketing audits.
Practical tips for an email marketing audit
Follow these five tips to make the most of your email marketing audits:
1. Divide your audit tasks
Dividing your audit into tasks will make it manageable and give you more time to analyze the areas that offer the biggest improvements.
Separating campaign elements reveals what’s generating revenue versus what’s burning subscriber engagement. For instance, you can compare template performance across devices to determine why mobile users have a higher unsubscribe rate than desktop ones.
Another audit you can run is analyzing abandoned cart flows independently from post-purchase follow-ups to pinpoint where potential sales drop off.
Your content audit focus will naturally shift toward winning combinations of subject lines, preview text, and CTAs that drive action.
Your sales team could transform surface metrics into revenue stories, showing which products drive the most revenue to refine your product picks in promotional emails.
Likewise, your website team could deepen your understanding of what categories and product pages are trending to inspire campaigns that month.
Your design and content teams could unite their expertise to craft segment-specific, stand-out emails. Campaign success rates might soar when your conversion rate optimization experts review email copy before campaign approval.
3. Experiment to enhance campaigns
Subject line performance varies dramatically when subscriber purchase history and engagement patterns are analyzed. Advanced personalization testing reveals how seemingly minor content adjustments spark significant conversion changes.
Cart abandonment sequence timing can show surprising variations in effectiveness across different customer segments. Mobile-first design testing exposes how template adjustments can influence engagement from phone-focused subscribers.
4. Remove inactive subscribers
Removing consistently inactive subscribers will protect your deliverability rate and improve targeting. Every dollar saved from maintaining dead contacts works harder when invested in active subscribers.
Before purging your list, distinguish between permanently disengaged contacts and those who might respond to a fresh approach. Those showing signs of engagement might benefit from a re-engagement campaign instead.
5. Find outside-the-box solutions
When your emails lose impact, it’s time to question your assumptions about customer behavior to enhance your email marketing strategy.
Better engagement could come from simple timing or message sequence shifts. You can also analyze cross-channel engagement patterns to expose ideal moments for SMS and email.
Auditing click-throughs and purchase times from emails can reveal timing opportunities for cart abandonment that standard audits miss.
Likewise, you could use the click map report in Omnisend to see where your subscribers click within emails and use that data to inform template design changes.
Conclusion
Email marketing audits transform underperforming campaigns into revenue-generating communications that enhance customer experience.
The right email marketing platform will help you conduct thorough audits. Omnisend lets you define clear goals for revenue, campaign performance, and channel success.
It then reports total store revenue and the percentage from Omnisend, plus revenue from campaigns and automations as percentages. You also get a channel performance revenue breakdown for email, SMS, and push.
Unaddressed email campaigns can bleed revenue through poor deliverability, outdated list management, and misaligned content. Cleaning inactive subscribers, optimizing send times, and refining automation workflows can dramatically improve those issues.
For instance, if post-purchase follow-ups are crucial to gathering feedback for social proof, you could focus your efforts on that automation workflow.
Use email marketing audits as an opportunity to cut waste from your efforts and turn email into one of your most profitable channels.
Join Omnisend for complete insights into your email marketing
Milda is a Senior Content Marketing Manager at Omnisend, with extensive experience in communication, helping brands establish a unique and authentic online presence.
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