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How to conduct an email marketing automation audit

4 mins read

Carrying out an email marketing automation audit helps you measure the performance of your email strategies and outline areas which can be improved on. 

Paul,Mayzin,Raza@2x

To help you carry out a successful audit, we’ve put together a blog which outlines the important elements to take into consideration, such as testing email subject lines and regularly updating your contact database.

  1. Your send name and email address
  2. Subject lines and preheader text
  3. The copy inside your emails
  4. Your call to actions
  5. Segmenting your contact database

1. Your sender name and email address

When conducting an audit, always ask yourself the question 'Are people going to trust and show interest in our emails if it’s being sent by that person or in some instances, no person at all?'

For example, if your email is coming from a member of the marketing team, there’s a good chance that some people may not have dealt with this person. This can confuse the recipient and potentially hinder them from opening your email. 

If your emails are being sent from sales@XXYY.com, people will instantly think that you’re trying to sell them something. Again, most probably affecting the performance of your email.

Similarly with info@XXYY.com, this sounds very impersonal and mass produced. In reality, your emails need to be tailored to your audience if you wish to see any chance of success.

Therefore, you should always perform tests on these elements and analyse them during your audit. You may send one email from a sales representative and the next from a Director.

If the email from the Director performs better - bingo. You can then send out more emails from this sender name moving forward.

When sending out emails, it’s important to show authority. You should therefore try to send your emails from experts or people who have a high level of importance at your company. Directors and Managers are always a good bet.

2. Subject lines and preheader text

If your emails are struggling to bring in the desired open rates, there’s a good chance that your subject lines aren’t up to scratch. Research has found that 47% of recipients open emails based on the subject line alone. Nuts.

Therefore, your audit should be heavily focused around the subject lines used and whether there’s room for improvement moving forward. Subject lines are one of the best elements you can test.

For example, you could use personalisation tokens in your first email. Address the reader by their first name and really try and resonate with them. Then, in the second automated email, pose a question to the user. 

Questions are always good because they make the user think. It also sounds as though you’re interested in what they have to say instead of just overwhelming them with information. 

By showing interest in your customers, you’ll get to know more about them. The more you know about your customers, the easier it is to identify opportunities to sell them new products and target them with appropriate offers. 

Your audit should then carefully analyse these subject lines and conclude the findings based on best practices.

3. The copy inside your emails 

Your email copy is potent. It’s the difference between high and low click through rates. Your copy should entice the reader and make them feel as though there’s a need to click on your CTAs. 

Your audit will consider the top-performing emails within a specific campaign, which helps you  identify what kind of email copy is resonating best with your audience. This will also help you establish best practices for your email campaigns moving forward.

HubSpot has put together a blog which outlines some awesome tips for writing email copy. Check them out below: 

  • Use actionable language
  • Establish relevance 
  • Write in the second person
  • Talk about the benefits, not the features
  • Get to the point 

These are just a few components of your email copy which you should consider in your audit. Something else which is really important is the CTAs which you are using.

4. Your call to actions

CTAs improve customer engagement, grow web traffic and ultimately increase your conversions and sales. They should therefore be carefully considered when you conduct your email automation audit.

Here are a few different elements which are worth thinking about when you conduct your audit:

    • Your CTA’s design - it needs to grab the user’s attention. So, experiment with things such as colour but make sure they’re consistent with the template which you use.
    • Positioning - always be sure that your CTA is positioned correctly. Think about the user experience. If they have to scroll a significant amount before seeing the CTA, this will affect click through rates.
    • The CTA’s copy - what does the copy on the CTA say? It should always prompt some kind of action which makes it obvious to the reader that this is where they need to click. 

Again, the effectiveness of call to actions all comes down to resonance. When a CTA is built for the subscriber, they’re more likely to click.

5. Segmenting your contact database

I know, everyone seems to bang on about segmentation nowadays, but it really is a massive part of email marketing success. If you’re sending out emails to the wrong people, then you’ve already set yourself up to fail. 

What you’re essentially doing is called list management. This involves managing your database based on their engagement and who they are. HubSpot is one of the best when it comes to list management.

Find out more about everything you can do with lists in HubSpot in this awesome blog they put together.

So, let’s sum things up…

  • Your sender name and the email address which your emails are being sent from are a big area which you need to focus on when you conduct your email marketing audit. They can have a detrimental impact on your open rates if they aren’t correct.
  • Subject lines are a biggy too. They need to be compelling and stand out in your customers' inboxes. Here are 19 tips from HubSpot on how to write catchy email subject lines.
  • Copy is key. It should always resonate with your audience. Your audit should be able to distinguish the difference between emails with good copy and emails with copy which isn’t really working. 
  • Spend time getting your call to actions right. If one isn’t working, your audit should be able to tell you some potential reasons why. Is it the positioning? Does the design need improving? The better the CTA, the better the clicks.
  • Segment, segment, segment again. When it comes to lists, less is usually more. The more time you spend on your list management, the more time you can spend relishing over those high performing emails.

Email marketing is a key part of HubSpot success. However, there’s so much more which you need to get right. That’s why we’ve put together our new guide, which discusses everything you need to know to ensure your HubSpot account is set up correctly. 

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