An email audit should be at the top of your January to-do list.
Here’s why: If you’re like most ecommerce businesses, email optimization gradually falls to the bottom of your priority list as the year goes on. You know it’s important because email is one of your most lucrative channels, if not the most lucrative. But it feels less urgent than the figurative fires you’re putting out every day, so to the bottom of the list it goes.
What is an email audit?
An email audit is when you comb through your automations, campaigns, and analytics to make sure everything is optimized and working as it should. Audits can uncover easy-to-fix problems like broken links, as well as more strategic issues like declining clickthrough rates or missing flows.
It’s easy for many ecommerce businesses to kick the can on email audits — after all, you’ve already set up some campaigns and flows. Isn’t that the point of “set it and forget it?”
Not exactly. Automation should be more about “set it and assess it.” Set it up so your event-based emails send at the most optimal time for each individual customer based on their interaction with your site. But, come back and assess those messages regularly to make sure they’re working as expected.
January is an ideal time to audit your email program
Top ecommerce stores regularly audit their email automations and campaigns, especially in January, for three important reasons:
1.) January is a crucial month for post-holiday retention. All those website visitors, subscribers, and purchasers are still extremely warm prospects. About 90% of purchases happen within 12 days of the initial click (75% of those are within 24 hours of the initial click), so it’s advantageous to make sure those people are seeing the most optimized content possible in January. For existing purchasers, the time between purchases is about 90 days, though that could vary based on your vertical (e.g. if you sell dog food that people would be refilling every 30 days).
2.) January, particularly leading into February, is slower for most businesses. After the post-holiday sales of early January have died down, ecommerce businesses find some breathing room later in January and into February. This gives stores the bandwidth to audit their email automations and implement changes.
3.) Poorly performing emails compound over the year. If you have a flow that you haven’t touched in years, you wouldn’t be alone. But if you never look into whether your flows and campaigns are generating as many clicks and as much revenue as they could, then you risk sending out bad emails month-over-month. Fix the problems in January, and you’ll set yourself up for more revenue in the calendar year. Drag your feet until June, and you’ll have a growing snowball of “what-if” revenue that you’ll never get to see. As in, “What if I had a better email hero graphic in the welcome series and could have converted twice as many customers into purchasers right off the bat?”
Take these 3 steps when auditing your emails
Now that you’re eager to hit the ground running in the new year, here are three important steps to prioritize:
1.) Make sure your key flows are on.
At a minimum, you should have:
- Abandoned site
- Abandoned browse
- Abandoned cart — added to cart
- Abandoned checkout
- Welcome series
- Post-purchase thank you
Depending on your product vertical, replenishment/order reminder flows are a must to ensure that recurring revenue keeps coming in. Many customer engagement platforms have default versions of these flows that are easy to turn on. Remember, however, that the content of those flows is often generic and needs to be updated to see better results.
2.) Look at your email graphics and personalize as much as possible.
Email graphics are one of the biggest drivers of clicks and traffic to your website, and personalized emails drive 40% more revenue than generic ones.
Plain-text emails or emails with graphics buried at the bottom simply won’t perform as well as emails with a strong, personalized hero graphic at the top. Consider:
- Is there a hero graphic at the top of the email?
- Is it personalized to the recipient, down to the product imagery?
- Is there a clear call-to-action?
- Is there a discount to entice the customer to buy faster?
- Are your clickthrough rates low or declining?
Low clickthrough rates (the number of clicks over the number of opens) indicate that people are opening your emails, looking at the content, and not feeling inspired to buy. The click rate (clicks over emails sent) averages to 0.93% for retail and online stores.
Grid & Pixel makes it really easy to add personalized, animated graphics to your campaigns and automations, so you can revamp stale emails in a matter of seconds and see stronger clickthrough rates.
3. Check the links in your emails.
If the links in your emails are broken or taking people to the wrong place, a simple mistake could be costing you thousands of dollars each month. Here’s how to check:
- Send yourself a test of each email in your automated flows. It might seem tedious, but it matters!
- Click on each link to make sure it works and takes you to the desired destination. If the link doesn’t work, change it and re-test.
- Make sure the destination takes customers to their lowest friction point in the purchase funnel. If they haven’t done more than browse your site, that’ll be the website. If they have made it all the way to checkout but didn’t finish the purchase, you’ll want to take them back to the checkout page.
Reducing friction in the purchase process is incredibly important to saving as many customers as possible. To help facilitate, our app’s graphics are powered by an AI engine that determines what link destination is the most optimized based on which flow the graphic is added to. And it’s all done automatically.
There are plenty of other steps to a really thorough email audit, but these three make the most impact on your bottom line. Instead of pushing that email audit off to next month (and the month after, and the month after that…), make it a priority in January so you can reap the rewards all year long.
