Emails continue to remain the primary method of business communication in the digital era and have not lost their relevance decades after their inception. Today, they serve several other crucial purposes, marketing being one of them. Businesses (especially online ones) extensively use email marketing to keep in touch with their existing users and customers, target a new customer segment, etc. According to a recent survey, almost 65% of small businesses prefer email marketing over direct social media channels such as Instagram and Twitter. Hence, it is clear that businesses cannot afford to ignore email marketing in today’s times. However, to ensure success through this marketing channel, it is crucial to evaluate and review the efficacy of your email marketing strategy and process, and this is where an email audit can be of significant help.
What is an Email Audit?
An email audit helps you to review the deliverability of your email marketing campaign. It helps to detect issues that might exist and can thus help you mitigate potential email security risks. There are two different ways for carrying out an email audit:
- Internal audit (carried out by members of the organization)
- External audit (carried out by a third party, an external organization)
Why is an Email Audit Required?
Email audits play an important role in the success of marketing strategies. Apart from reviewing and reporting the deliverability rate of emails, an email audit can analyze and review the quality of the content of the mail, efficacy, email security settings, deliverability, etc. thereby, helping you protect the reputation of your business and making it thrive, simultaneously.
How to Get Started with an Email Audit?
There are various steps involved in the process of an email audit. However, the two most important steps include:
- An overall analysis of the email account
- Analysis of audience and engagement
Overall analysis
This is a significant stepping stone in the entire process of email auditing. A comprehensive analysis provides you with an overview of your organization’s email marketing performance. It involves two basic yet pivotal kinds of analysis:
- Analysis of metric durations (monthly, quarterly or yearly durations) and trends.
- Analysis of revenue by calculating the ratio of the total revenue received from the email broadcast compared to the total revenue received. A higher ratio would mean better performance of the email broadcast.
Analysis of Engagement and Audience
Audience analysis means categorizing the target audience to whom the emails are sent. Email receivers are classified into various sections such as pre-purchase and post-purchase or even loyal and lapsed customers (those that have purchased products or services, once only).
How Can Email Audits Help Your Online Business?
Whether it is a multinational or an SME, enterprises of all sizes depend, to some extent, on email marketing to target new customer segments, interact with existing customers and clients, etc. And there are a few factors that affect the performance of the email marketing campaign; these include deliverability, IP reputation, quality of content, the targeted audience, etc. An email audit assists you in assessing all these factors.
It helps you get an overview of the performance of your business
Generally, the vendor who does the email audit for your business sends you a report containing:
- The percentage of the audience that has opened, clicked on, unsubscribed your mail, or even marked it as spam.
- The revenue received from emails.
- The ROI (return on investment) received from the email marketing process.
It helps protect your email account from threat actors
Phishing and ransomware are not uncommon concerns for online businesses. Emails serve as the primary vectors for such attacks. An email audit will point out the loopholes and vulnerabilities that threat actors could exploit. An ideal email vendor will also provide email security solutions that can help patch these vulnerabilities.
It helps you build and manage your audience
Although you might have worked hard to make a list of your target audience, it might not always yield the expected response. An email audit will carry out an extensive analysis of your sent emails and make a report of the changes you could bring to your target audience list to ensure a better response.
It helps you find new and alternative features to improve the business process
Email audits can open up new doorways to adopting solutions that can help manage your organization’s emails efficiently during an outage, or a merger or acquisition has to occur. Two of the most crucial solutions include:
- MX Backup: The primary mailing server which sends emails on your domain’s behalf can go down for any reason. This is where having an MX backup server becomes crucial to have. It helps you ensure email delivery during the event of an outage of the primary mail server.
- Tenant-to-tenant migration: If your organization decides to acquire another business entity or merge, it is only pertinent to have one common email infrastructure than maintaining two separate ones. A reliable tenant-to-tenant migration service provider can help you achieve the same, without having to go through the nuisance of all the technicalities yourself.
Final Words
Those days are long gone when one had to perform every task manually when it came to handling the email requirements for an organization. Automating email processes helps save time, costs and allows an organization to remain competitive in today’s world. One such process that organizations can automate is handling the majority of their email requirements themselves. The first step towards that is to perform a comprehensive email audit to evaluate the performance of email marketing strategies and how the overall email processes can be improved at large.