Email Marketing Strategy: 9 Tips for an Effective Email Marketing Audit

Sending automated emails to your subscribers is a cost-effective marketing tool, but are the emails you’re sending out the best they can be? 

One way to highlight any problems or weaknesses is to conduct an email marketing audit. You can ask a marketing agency to do an in-depth audit for you, or you can check your email marketing efforts yourself.

Here are 9 factors to look for in Email Marketing Strategy that could be impacting your performance.

1. Subject Lines

The subject line is highly important when sending out emails and must be compelling enough to make people open the email. Are your subject lines getting people to do this? Check campaign reports to see which subject lines have high open rates and which don’t. What makes the high performing emails stand out? Subject lines need to offer value to the subscriber (e.g. discount, free offer or new product), and look at making them shorter and simpler.

2. Sender Name

People are extremely sensitive about spam so your emails need to clearly display a sender name so they know to trust the source. If it’s your name, make sure both first name and last name are appearing and that your company email address is visible. It can make the difference between your email being opened vs being ignored or deleted. Always use this sender name and address to send future emails so you build trust with your subscribers.

3. Personalization

First impressions are important in email marketing and you don’t have much time with an email to capture someone’s attention. You can do this by personalizing your email, such as addressing them by their first name, and delivering a concise message that sounds like it was written by a real person, for a real person. That way your email has a much higher chance of being read rather than discarded.

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4. Body Copy

The message within your content also needs to be compelling enough to make people take action, ideally clicking through to a landing page where they can buy or find out more information. Analyze past campaigns and sort by highest and lowest click rates, are there are any commonalities within the high performing content? Try to make content relevant and personal and offer value to the reader, use any information you have on your subscribers to personalize content (e.g. gender, birthday, location, clothing size etc.), use humor and a conversational style.

5. Image Content and Format

Check the images you’re using, and how long they take to load when the email opens. Ideally they should be 640 pixels wide and be optimized for the web. The images you’re using should also represent your brand.

6. Calls to Action

Do you have the best calls to action at the bottom of your emails? Making slight tweaks to a CTA, like changing “learn more” to “buy now”, can drive more readers to click and convert. Look at using contrasting colors, make sure the CTA is large enough to be seen, use compelling copy and link to a relevant landing page that meets expectations.

7. Mobile Friendly

Do you know how your emails appear on mobile? It may look great on desktop but may be too small to read on mobile or interact with. By doing a test to see how they’re viewed by your customers on the most common devices, you can make improvements. But be careful not to downgrade the desktop experience by doing so. Use a platform that allows you to tailor layout and content for mobile, as well as desktop.

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8. Outreach Frequency

Too many emails and your subscribers will feel bombarded, too little and they’ll forget who you are. So what’s the right frequency to send emails? There’s no right answer to this unfortunately, you have to find your own sweet spot, whether this is 1 email a month, 2 to 3 emails a month, or 6 to 8 emails a month. Consistency rather than frequency may be more important here, but you can also get insights from the unsubscribe comments, i.e. if you get a lot of people saying you send too many emails, you may want to tweak your frequency.

9. Send Day and Time

Like any kind of online marketing, there are better times than others to deliver email content so you can optimize your chances of being read. Studies have shown that: Tuesday is the best day to send an email, while there are a few times that do well – 10am, 8pm to midnight, 2pm and 6am. The key is to choose the time zone for the majority of your audience.

By analyzing, reviewing and tracking the impact of your emails you can remove some of the guesswork and increase your chances of clicks and conversions every time you send out a email marketing campaign.