What goes into an email marketing audit?

When we run email marketing audits we look at five main areas - here’s how we approached each of them for Mencap:

Internal stakeholders

We ran online focus groups with all the teams using email marketing to understand their feelings on what was working well and what could be better. 

We used discussion and live survey tool Mentimeter to gauge opinion. 

The results helped to set and prioritise the goals for the project overall.

Deliverability

Deliverability describes how likely it is that an email will reach a subscriber’s inbox without being marked as spam or junk.

There are lots of different tools you can use to run a deliverability audit - we used MX Toolbox.

We also looked at the data on soft bounces and Internet Service Provider or Spam complaints on Mencap’s email marketing software. 

The results were used to help improve deliverability. 

Data flow and processes

Understanding Mencap’s email data flow and processes helped us map out smoother email journeys for their community. 

We looked in detail and conducted testing with:

• List growth and sign up processes

• Preference centre functionality

• Welcome automations

• Re-engagement automations

• Unsubscribe process

This included looking at and mapping the data flow for these processes between the email marketing system and CRM to identify areas for improvement. 

Benchmarking

Tracking key metrics like open, click to open, click-through and unsubscribe rates is important. However, to make these metrics even more meaningful it was helpful to benchmark them against other charity and non-profit organisations. 

We used the benchmark data from Campaign Monitor for Mencap’s audit. 

The results helped us to understand which parts of the programme were performing well and which parts could be better. 

Content Audit

To audit Mencap’s email content, we selected three items to analyse.

We used Data from Mencap’s email marketing tool to learn about:

• Open rate - percentage of people who opened the email

• Click to open - percentage of people sent the email who opened and clicked a link

• Click through rate - percentage of email openers who clicked a link

We used Co-Schedule subject line tester to run a subject line analysis

We used Grammarly writing assistant to audit readability and accessibility

The result was a series of valuable recommendations which Mencap could implement with internal teams.