5 Key Points to Look at When Auditing Emails

It's Friday already. I hope you've had a fantastic week so far.

Mine is great — busy preparing campaign series to promote a new collection for a client and working on holiday season campaigns for all accounts. Everything is exciting!

Okay, enough for the introduction. Let's get into the main topic of today's newsletter: Email audit.

When I audit email for a new brand, I go through the same points you might have seen in other guides, for example:

• Klaviyo setup, integrations

• Flows: how many, what are they, number of emails, conditional splits, offers, etc.

• Campaigns: Frequency, content, offers, A/B test, send time, deliverability

• Email template

• Segmentation

• Mobile optimization

• Metrics

But apart from these, I also look at some other specific things:

1. The number of active profiles vs. the number of email subscribers vs. the number of people who aren't suppressed emails and haven't subscribed yet. The goal is to understand how well the brand is turning customers/site visitors into email subscribers and figure out the why behind the differences.

2. Audience engagement. I'll create a "Master Subscribers" segment, which includes those who aren't suppressed emails and Subscribed to List at least once over time or Fill Out Lead Ad at least once over time or Accept Marketing True. Then, check the engagement of this segment. This is to understand how subscribers are generally engaged with emails.

3. UTM tracking. Is it enabled in all emails? How are its parameters set up? UTM tracking is vital because it'll help you track Klaviyo performance in Google Analytics. If you just depend on numbers shown on Klaviyo dashboard, it might not reflect the accurate picture of email contribution to overall revenue.

4. Email sender. It's easy to assume the sender's email address always includes brand domain name, for example, [email protected]. But surprisingly, I recently audited some brands, and they always use [x]@gmail.com to send emails, which can lead to a high spam complaint rate.

5. Which list contains subscribers opting in via embedded form at the bottom of the site. This is the case, especially if a brand migrates from MailChimp to Klaviyo. I've seen quite a few brands still using MailChimp form for the bottom newsletter signup form after moving to Klaviyo, and because the MailChimp - Klaviyo integration isn't set up correctly, subscribers from this form aren't synced into Klaviyo. Consequently, many subscribers haven't received any emails from the brand after subscribing.

Some people consider looking at these things once they actually work on email strategy and planning, not at the stage of auditing emails. But I'd like to look at everything from the get-go to understand what a brand is doing well, what they need to improve, and what opportunities they're missing.

What is your email audit process? Feel free to share with me — love to learn from you too.

Have a great weekend, and thank you for reading.

Lavender

🌻 It's September already. Do you have any exciting schedule for this month? Mine is spending more time painting and preparing Christmas gifts for my friends ;)

❓ Have any questions about Klaviyo, ecom email, or sustainability? Tell me, and I'll share what I know.

💌 Need my help with email strategy, planning, and implementation? Feel free to drop me a message, and we can chat. You can click here to learn about my service offerings.

:: 😊 "When it comes to email strategy – not many people have the brain for it. Not only does Lavender have a brain built for email strategy, but she's also got the copywriting skills to match. She's a pro at finding (and filling) the gaps in your email experience and increasing email revenue." Samar Owais, Founder of Emails Done Right, eCommerce Email Strategist