Why your email marketing needs an annual audit (like an MOT)
Are you the type of person who takes their car for an MOT and feels confident everything’s going to be fine? Or do you cross your fingers, toes, and any other body part you can manage in the hope that it might just scrape a pass?
It’s a matter of confidence, sure, but it’s also down to what’s happened since the last time your car was checked. Have you been checking your tyres and your oil level? Have you been paying attention to how it runs to make sure all is well? Or have you been ignoring every light that pops up on the dashboard?
Perhaps you can already recognise yourself in those behaviours when it comes to your email marketing. You’re regularly checking your Klaviyo dashboards or you haven’t looked at them in months. You’re A/B testing throughout your flows or you don’t remember the last time you reviewed them.
This is why it occurs to me that email marketing audits share quite a few similarities with an MOT. Here’s what I mean.
Can your email marketing get you from A to B?
An MOT is essentially a way to measure whether your car is fit for purpose, i.e. getting you from A to B on the road. The same can be said for an email audit.
When I work with clients on an audit, we are looking for the answer to one simple question: “Is the email marketing set up we have going to get us from where we are to where we want to go?” Essentially, will our email strategy, tools and tactics help us to meet the business and marketing goals we have?
You probably already know something isn’t quite right
That feeling of something being wrong shows up as nervous glances at your phone as you wait to hear from the garage, or in the way you push email tasks to the bottom of your to-do list. The chances are if you’re exploring an email audit, you suspect something isn’t working.
In the case of your car, the lack of confidence comes from the ticking noise that’s become the soundtrack to your drives, or how it struggles to start on a cold morning. For your email marketing, it might be a drop off in your engagement rates, a reduction in your email attributed revenue, or maybe even just a loss of certainty that everything’s doing what it’s supposed to do.
You can pass, but there might still be advisories
There are three outcomes of an MOT: a fail, a pass and a pass with advisories. An audit can feel similar, particularly when brands are hoping to be given an overall “mark” - a bit like a verdict on how well they’re doing.
Often in the audits I run, things are better than clients thought they were. There’s usually a lot they’re getting right and I make sure I tell them - it’s just as important to know what’s working well as what’s not so that you know where to double down. But pretty much every time, there are advisories.
Advisories might look like a flow that’s full of the old branding, making it feel like a different business to the customer receiving those emails. It might be a sign up form that has been sending new contacts to the wrong list. It could be that your post purchase automation is only sending to first time purchasers and your returning customers are being completely ignored (yep, I saw that one very recently).
None of these things by themselves is a fail, but together they begin to build a picture of a channel that isn’t being looked after. Addressing them improves the health of your email marketing and increases your chances of getting to your destination or goal.
It’s a valuable thing to do whether you’re confident or not
At the beginning of this article, we talked about the two different types of people: the confident ones and the nervous ones.
An MOT is valuable for both groups. A pass for the first group reinforces their confidence, and even a fail or advisories help to give them real clarity on what needs to be done to ensure all is well. Those coming into an email audit feeling things are pretty good get to know that for certain, and they come away with tips and tricks to make things even better.
The second group benefits because they can finally name the thing that’s been concerning them. It goes from being a feeling to a list of action points they can begin to fix - and in my experience, what often holds brands back in fixing their email marketing is not knowing where to start.
It might be time to give your email marketing its annual MOT
Whether it’s your car or your email strategy, paying attention to how it’s working and taking a closer look when it feels like something might be off is invaluable. As with an MOT, I always recommend brands conduct an in-depth email audit at least once a year to be sure they’re still moving in the right direction.
Doing this means you’ll know what's working fine, what should be monitored because it might cause problems down the line, and what absolutely needs addressing to be fit for purpose.
If you’re looking to audit your email marketing, The Intentional Inbox offers a deep dive into your current email marketing, your data, and your customer journey to understand exactly how email is supporting your business - and where it isn’t yet. You’ll come away with a clear, prioritised roadmap for the next 90 days, so you know exactly what to work on and why.
Or get in touch to book a call and see how I can help.