Audit of email letters

Despite the numerous advertising tools available, email letters remains the most popular method of client communication. And, like any other tool, email marketing in the company needs systematic auditing and updating. Let's figure out together under what parameters it is possible and necessary to audit mailings.

Technical parameters

Properly configured technical parameters in email marketing are the key to the successful passage of your letter to the inbox instead of spam. To make mailings work like clockwork, be sure to check:

• Authentication. A classic technical parameter of email distribution, which includes signatures of SPF, DKIM, and DMARC in the letter. They are checked by any mail service, after which it decides whether to skip the letter further to the recipient or block it in the process of sending.
• The sender's email. All commercial and brand-image mailings should be sent from the corporate address and not from the usual mail formats. Firstly, this again affects the deliverability of emails, and secondly, it's just bad form for a serious brand.

After you have checked the main technical parameters, without which even the most beautiful letter will not reach the final goal, you can proceed to the next audit item.

Base

For a professional email marketer, working with the database takes about 60% of the time. This is especially true for brands with a geographic reach that extends far beyond a single city or even country. Multi-brand companies are also very interested in proper segmentation and database setup.

Turning to the audit of your mail database, pay attention to:

• Database activity. Or, simply put, how happy your target audience is with your mailings. Will help you with this indicator, OR (open rate), which displays the number of open emails throughout the database. Many modern email services that brands work with already mark the activity of each subscriber inside the database, attributing a rating to him. It is useful to run your databases for the presence of "dead" or spam addresses every 3 months; this way, you will not encounter incorrect email statistics and your mail database will be clean and up-to-date.

• Accurate and thorough segmentation. In the list of your contacts, each segment should be:

a) any email marketer in your company should be named correctly and clearly.
b) filtered by the parameters by which you segment your target audience.

This is done so that at the time of choosing the list for mailing, there are no questions about "who are we sending this to?" and each letter is intended for a certain segment of the target audience.

The segmentation of the audience of email newsletters can be very diverse and depends, first of all, on the goals of your letter. With proper work with the database, mailing lists will become not only a way of communicating but also a lead-generating tool.

Letters

And here, creative indicators are connected to the audit — design, structure, headings, and text inside your mailing list. When analyzing the letter for viability, pay attention to the following parameters:

• Adaptability. Any of your emails should be opened correctly and displayed on any device. You can read both from your PC at work and from your phone on the way to a meeting. Every button, every image, and even the mandatory unsubscribe form must be displayed correctly. You can check the adaptivity of the mailing list with the mail service or by contacting a professional auditor.

• Design. The email mailing design industry is developing rapidly, and brands are offering more and more interesting options for the layout of letters. Look at the visuals of competitors, read about trends in your industry, listen to a webinar on email marketing — knowledge about current design is now available to anyone. Important: it is not necessary to copy the popular style of letters in your newsletter; the design should be appropriate to the subject and goals of your letter.

• Headings and texts. Even if you are a supporter of minimalism and try to show everything through a visual, the title, title, and header are mandatory for any letter. A person should be sure that he is not opening another spam message but a useful letter in which the content corresponds to the title. The texts in the letters should be concise and motivate the reader to follow the links that you have left for him.

In the letter itself, you can also see a map of transitions; very often, there may be errors in the placement of links and buttons in the templates. The map clearly shows where your audience clicks more often and which places in the letter they do not pay attention to.

Recommendations

During the audit, we also recommend looking at the subscription form on the website — sometimes it needs to be "refreshed" a little to attract the attention of new potential subscribers. These items will be enough for an initial and quick audit; with their help, you will definitely identify weaknesses and be able to work them out.