Email marketing audit

How will this email marketing audit help me and my business?

It's hard to plan a route from A to B if you don't know where you are or even where you need to be. Improving your email marketing is a constant process of examination and optimization, which means regular audits are essential. By regularly benchmarking your capabilities, making improvements to your next campaigns, then reassessing your skills, you'll see how elements of your email marketing strengthen over time.

The aim of this audit is to provide a fast and systematic method of evaluating the use of email marketing communications and marketing automation within a company. Our email marketing audit is easy to complete, gives you comprehensive criteria to assess your skills against, and provides all the key activities that need to be considered within your email marketing strategy, broken down into six categories:

1. Objectives and Value
2. Evaluation
3. Email Communications Strategy
4. Copy and Design
5. Deliverability and Permissions
6. Governance

How is the audit structured?

Our audit is filled with situation statements for you to grade yourself against. For each statement, such as:

"We track revenue generated from our email marketing."

you will grade yourself on the following scale:

• 0 – We haven't addressed this
• 1 – We're poor at this
• 2 – We've looked into this and are working on it
• 3 – We're about average compared to our competitors
• 4 – We're good at this but we can optimize
• 5 – We think we're one of the best at this

Once you have scored your capability for all of your statements, you will be presented with a radar chart to be used as a summary of your email marketing proficiency across the different elements. By reading back through your statement scores, you will know the activities you need to work on initially and what you can look to improve in the next 6-12 months. You may be tempted to stay comfortable with statements score 4-5, but there's always room for innovation and potential to push your results higher!

Who is the email marketing audit for?

This email marketing audit has been created for marketing directors, managers, and agencies involved in email marketing who want to improve their marketing automation.

The audit can be completed by a single marketer, but you should consider walking through it with a colleague, your team or an external consultant. Doing so will stimulate insightful conversation as you consider each statement and how your brand measured up to your competitors.

Latest updates

This audit has been updated to include links to new guides, templates and Learning Path modules from Smart Insights to help you improve at each stage of your email marketing audit. It also now includes a slicer filter so you can see statements that you have given specific ratings (e.g., see all '1' rated statements). When you are developing a plan to improve your email marketing, review how you have rated the above statements and prioritize them using the following matrix:

• 0 – These tasks either need addressing immediately (as you do not use them) or should be disregarded (as they do not apply to you).
• 1 – These tasks are priorities for improvement in the next three months.
• 2 – These tasks should preferably be improved over the next 3-6 months.
• 3 – These tasks are being completed competently, so opportunities for optimization should be researched.
• 4 – These tasks are reliably completed, so long-term opportunities for refinement and experimentation should be researched.
• 5 – These tasks are executed to an extremely high standard, meaning you may want to think of creative ways to innovate.