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10 questions to ask when auditing your email program

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10 questions to ask when auditing your email program

Back in January 2018, I wrote a MarTech column with advice I give clients when the fiscal year is young. 

I suggested you take some time off to plan your marketing strategy for the coming year. Forsake the hustle and distractions of the office and take your team to some offsite location where everybody can stretch their legs, let their minds run free and get the inspiration flowing. 

I also included a five-point plan for auditing your email marketing program before starting the strategic planning process. This gave you a foundation and direction for your planning process. It also revealed how your team members felt about the work they’re doing.

A lot has changed since I wrote that column. How well does it hold up? 

Time to rethink the email audit?

COVID-19 and its aftershocks certainly threw a big wrench into marketing operations, but it wasn’t the only factor reshaping the email landscape. Corporate restructuring, the “Great Resignation,” a new focus on “owned” data (zero-party and first-party data), economic and political upheavals and the continued evolution of marketing technology — all of these have left their marks on many email programs. 

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Here’s what I found: My initial advice still stands. (Yeah!) But now, I can see there’s more work to do to understand how your email program is performing and create the strategies that will help your program achieve its goals.

Now: A 10-point email audit for strategic planning

Yes, I gave you more work. But that means you’ll end up with an even more helpful document.

Even if you don’t do a full-blown strategic planning session every year (email marketing team of one, I’m talking to you), this audit will guide you through the background research you need to identify your email strengths and weaknesses and plot your course for the 12 months. 

This research, and the insights you pull from it, become the basis for your strategic plan. Without this work, your planning retreat won’t go beyond aimless blue-sky banter. That’s not how you make your budget numbers or generate the kind of results that give you bragging rights about how well email helps your company achieve its goals. 

Feel free to adjust my audit points, so they work with your company’s unique email situation or add areas that you think I missed. (If you do, tell me what you added!). 

Numbers one through five below are the new points for your email audit. I also included the five from the previous version — for more details on those, check out my original blog post.

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1. How do you measure success?

If you’re an e-commerce brand, your number one question should be, “How much money did this email campaign bring in?” The corollary to this question is, “Did it make as much money as I was expecting?”

All the metrics you use should help you answer that question: total revenue attributed to email, revenue per email, revenue per subscriber, and so on.

What doesn’t measure revenue? The open rate. It has never been a reliable success metric, but it has become even less so since 2021, thanks to Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection feature. 

If your audit shows you rely on opens to report success to your bosses, you need to change it.

Read next: Study finds iOS 15 is inflating email open rates

2. What are you doing to keep your email lists clean and up to date?

List hygiene is more important than ever now for two reasons:

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  • We have to deal with more factors that pollute the database, like spoofed or disposable email addresses and out-of-date addresses, thanks to turnover from COVID-19 layoffs.
  • As cookies phase out, the email address has become much more important as an audience identifier across channels. You have to be sure this primary data point is up to date. (See my point 6 below on acquiring primary email addresses, too.)

3. What’s the overall tone of your email content?

I’m looking at two drivers for this point:

  • Many brands recalibrated their communications while the world was in lockdown to be more helpful and understanding. Sure, you still need to move product, but the “buy now” mentality is shifting toward “buy from us, and here’s why, and here’s how we can help.”
  • Brand equity is more important than ever now that we’re in a world where people will freak out over a single public misstep. I was already talking about this in 2019, but COVID, social media and the world, in general, are making it even more essential to think about how your email campaigns build up or eat away at your brand.  

4. How are your email automations working? 

How long has it been since you reviewed all of the email programs you use besides your basic promotional campaigns? 

I’m talking about a welcome program, transactional emails like abandonment, purchase, loyalty, repurchasing and reactivation.

In case you missed it, my latest MarTech column explained why your automations aren’t “set ’em and forget ’em” and what can happen when one goes rogue. Reviewing and recalibrating your automations should get built into the construction process.

Also, consider what new technology could help you solve some long-standing problems. You might be more data-dependent now than you were a few years ago. Could a central data platform (CDP) help you send better emails?

5. Where could you achieve better returns by bringing in outside help? 

If we learned anything about email over the last 2.5 years, it’s that email works. But making it work right takes time and resources.

If you don’t have the budget to hire full-time help, look for places where you could bring in contractors or an outside agency to take on some of the work you struggle with.

The recent layoffs at major tech companies have created a big pool of talented people who can bring an outsider’s viewpoint and specialized skills. 

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Here’s a thought: Hire one of them to audit your email program. You’ll get insights from someone who isn’t beholden to company politics or how things have always been done.


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6. Are you asking customers and users for their primary email addresses?

Multiple studies show that the average consumer has up to three email addresses, one of which is their primary email address. What are you doing to sell your program to get the right one?

The primary email address is the one your customers check most often. Emails to primary addresses are more likely to be opened and acted on. 

It’s also the one they guard most carefully. If you want people to give you their primary email addresses, you must give them realistic expectations of your program’s value.

7. How do your transactional emails make money for your email program?

This requires a specific focus on your transactional emails and is separate from your overall periodic review. Here you assess how much revenue those emails bring in — and what your customers do with them (open or click on them, go back to their carts, or ignore them.) 

To judge any potential opportunity, I have worked with retail companies that generate 30% to 50% or more of their email revenue from transactional and triggered emails. This is a good bar to measure your own performance.

The age-old guidance is that you can use 20% of your transactional email for promotional purposes. That’s enough space to get a connected product for upselling or cross-selling.

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You might need to revise your email template to update the branding, clarify the benefits, or smooth out the path back to the cart.

8. What’s your campaign workflow?

Ask each team member to write down the process you go through, from campaign research to email launch. 

  • Does everybody understand each step? 
  • Which steps get overlooked? 
  • Is there any step that has become the rule and not the exception that you should add?

You might discover that team members don’t understand what everybody’s role is in pulling a campaign together. 

Another benefit: This evaluation can reveal where the process breaks down and introduces errors or lost time.

Everybody outside the email team thinks email is either easy or a peripheral contributor to the company’s success. 

One of your jobs as an email team leader is letting everybody know just how badass email is.

After you figure out whether your emails are succeeding (see point 1), you need to broadcast that success to everybody who has a hand in deciding the email team’s fate – from budget to hiring to fast-tracking IT requests. 

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What could help you get the word out to your boss, to other marketing teams, and ultimately to the boss of your boss’s boss? 

10. What do you want to accomplish in the next six to 12 months?

This is separate from meeting your team’s revenue goal, and it comes last on the list for a reason. 

A thorough audit should expose opportunities as well as weaknesses. Have each team member list one or two things that could move the needle. 

Think like the marketer you are, too. Explain the goal, the strategy for achieving it, and the tactics you’ll need to implement your strategy — especially if you want to add technology.

One last step… 

Write everything down and put everything into a master document for every team member to consult. Go old school and print it out if you want. 

Doing so will keep everyone on the same page, so to speak, and keep your team pulling together.

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A pitch for bringing back the strategic planning session

If COVID-19 didn’t kill the offsite planning retreat, it definitely put the experience on pause. But now might be a good time to bring it back. 

Ideally, this planning retreat would happen at a beachside resort with an 18-hole championship golf course and fine dining nearby. But even if your budget will stretch only far enough to cover box lunches in the boardroom, the concept is the same: Get the gang together, lock the doors, turn off your phones, and think long and hard about what you need to accomplish in the coming year and what you have to do to get there. 

Having everybody on Zoom doesn’t cut it because you still have outside distractions, and video-call fatigue is real.

You need this time away from the email grind. Refocus on what’s coming beyond getting your next campaign to get out of the door. 

A strategic plan will help you identify your goals and objectives and outline the strategies you need to use, along with the tactics that will carry out those strategies. 

You’ll probably want to modify some things if COVID is still a challenge. Some team members will never feel comfortable in in-person gatherings anymore. But it’s worth the effort to try to restart in-person strategic planning even if your company is 100% remote.

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Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.


About The Author

As the co-founder of RPEOrigin.com, Ryan Phelan’s two decades of global marketing leadership has resulted in innovative strategies for high-growth SaaS and Fortune 250 companies. His experience and history in digital marketing have shaped his perspective on creating innovative orchestrations of data, technology and customer activation for Adestra, Acxiom, Responsys, Sears & Kmart, BlueHornet and infoUSA. Working with peers to advance digital marketing and mentoring young marketers and entrepreneurs are two of Ryan’s passions. Ryan is the Chairman Emeritus of the Email Experience Council Advisory Board and a member of numerous business community groups. He is also an in-demand keynote speaker and thought leader on digital marketing.

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How To Combine PR and Content Marketing Superpowers To Achieve Business Goals

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A figure pulls open a dress shirt to reveal the term PR on a Superman-like costume, reflecting the superpower resulting from combining content and PR.

A transformative shift is happening, and it’s not AI.

The aisle between public relations and content marketing is rapidly narrowing. If you’re smart about the convergence, you can forever enhance your brand’s storytelling.

The goals and roles of content marketing and PR overlap more and more. The job descriptions look awfully similar. Shrinking budgets and a shrewd eye for efficiency mean you and your PR pals could face the chopping block if you don’t streamline operations and deliver on the company’s goals (because marketing communications is always first to be axed, right?).

Yikes. Let’s take a big, deep breath. This is not a threat. It’s an opportunity.

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Reach across the aisle to PR and streamline content creation, improve distribution strategies, and get back to the heart of what you both are meant to do: Build strong relationships and tell impactful stories.

So, before you panic-post that open-to-work banner on LinkedIn, consider these tips from content marketing, PR, and journalism pros who’ve figured out how to thrive in an increasingly narrowing content ecosystem.

1. See journalists as your audience

Savvy pros know the ability to tell an impactful story — and support it with publish-ready collateral — grounds successful media relationships. And as a content marketer, your skills in storytelling and connecting with audiences, including journalists, naturally support your PR pals’ media outreach.

Strategic storytelling creates content focused on what the audience needs and wants. Sharing content on your blog or social media builds relationships with journalists who source those channels for story ideas, event updates, and subject matter experts.

“Embedding PR strategies in your content marketing pieces informs your audience and can easily be picked up by media,” says Alex Sanchez, chief experience officer at BeWell, New Mexico’s Health Insurance Marketplace. “We have seen reporters do this many times, pulling stories from our blogs and putting them in the nightly news — most of the time without even reaching out to us.”

Acacia James, weekend producer/morning associate producer at WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., says blogs and social media posts are helpful to her work. “If I see a story idea, and I see that they’re willing to share information, it’s easier to contact them — and we can also backlink their content. It’s huge for us to be able to use every avenue.” 

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Kirby Winn, manager of PR at ImpactLife, says reporters and assignment editors are key consumers of their content. “And I don’t mean a news release that just hit their inbox. They’re going to our blog and consuming our stories, just like any other audience member,” he says. “Our organization has put more focus into content marketing in the past few years — it supports a media pitch so well and highlights the stories we have to tell.”

Storytelling attracts earned media that might not pick up the generic news topic. “It’s one thing to pitch a general story about how we help consumers sign up for low-cost health insurance,” Alex says. “Now, imagine a single mom who just got a plan after years of thinking it was too expensive. She had a terrible car accident, and the $60,000 ER bill that would have ruined her financially was covered. Now that’s a story journalists will want to cover, and that will be relatable to their audience and ours.” 

2. Learn the media outlet’s audience

Seventy-three percent of reporters say one-fourth or less of the stories pitched are relevant to their audiences, according to Cision’s 2023 State of the Media Report (registration required).

PR pros are known for building relationships with journalists, while content marketers thrive in building communities around content. Merge these best practices to build desirable content that works for your target audience and the media’s audiences simultaneously.

WTOP’s Acacia James says sources who show they’re ready to share helpful, relevant content often win pitches for coverage. “In radio, we do a lot of research on who is listening to us, and we’re focused on a prototype called ‘Mike and Jen’ — normal, everyday people in Generation X … So when we get press releases and pitches, we ask, ‘How interested will Mike and Jen be in this story?’” 

3. Deliver the full content package (and make journalists’ jobs easier)

Cranking out content to their media outlet’s standards has never been tougher for journalists. Newsrooms are significantly understaffed, and anything you can do to make their lives easier will be appreciated and potentially rewarded with coverage. Content marketers are built to think about all the elements to tell the story through multiple mediums and channels.

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“Today’s content marketing pretty much provides a package to the media outlet,” says So Young Pak, director of media relations at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. “PR is doing a lot of storytelling work in advance of media publication. We (and content marketing) work together to provide the elements to go with each story — photos, subject matter experts, patients, videos, and data points, if needed.”   

At WTOP, the successful content package includes audio. “As a radio station, we are focused on high-quality sound,” Acacia James says. “Savvy sources know to record and send us voice memos, and then we pull cuts from the audio … You will naturally want to do someone a favor if they did you one — like providing helpful soundbites, audio, and newsworthy stories.”  

While production value matters to some media, you shouldn’t stress about it. “In the past decade, how we work with reporters has changed. Back in the day, if they couldn’t be there in person, they weren’t going to interview your expert,” says Jason Carlton, an accredited PR professional and manager of marketing and communications at Intermountain Health. “During COVID, we had to switch to virtual interviewing. Now, many journalists are OK with running a Teams or Zoom interview they’ve done with an expert on the news.”

BeWell’s Alex Sanchez agrees. “I’ve heard old school PR folks cringe at the idea of putting up a Zoom video instead of getting traditional video interviews. It doesn’t really matter to consumers. Focus on the story, on the timeliness, and the relevance. Consumers want authenticity, not super stylized, stiff content.”

4. Unite great minds to maximize efficiency

Everyone needs to set aside the debate about which team — PR or content marketing — gets credit for the resulting media coverage.

At MedStar Washington Hospital Center, So Young and colleagues adopt a collaborative mindset on multichannel stories. “We can get the interview and gather information for all the different pieces — blog, audio, video, press release, internal newsletter, or magazine. That way, we’re not trying to figure things out individually, and the subject matter experts only have to have that conversation once,” she says.

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Regular, cross-team meetings are essential to understand the best channels for reaching key audiences, including the media. A story that began life as a press release might reap SEO and earned media gold if it’s strategized as a blog, video, and media pitch.

“At Intermountain Health, we have individual teams for media relations, marketing, social media, and hospital communications. That setup works well because it allows us to bring in the people who are the given experts in those areas,” says Intermountain’s Jason Carlton. “Together, we decide if a story is best for the blog, a media pitch, or a mix of channels — that way, we avoid duplicating work and the risk of diluting the story’s impact.”

5. Measure what matters

Cutting through the noise to earn media mentions requires keen attention to metrics. Since content marketing and PR metrics overlap, synthesizing the data in your team meetings can save time while streamlining your storytelling efforts.

“For content marketers, using analytical tools such as GA4 can help measure the effectiveness of their content campaigns and landing pages to determine meaningful KPIs such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, lead generation, and conversion rates,” says John Martino, director of digital marketing for Visiting Angels. “PR teams can use media coverage and social interactions to assess user engagement and brand awareness. A unified and omnichannel approach can help both teams demonstrate their value in enhancing brand visibility, engagement, and overall business success.”

To track your shared goals, launch a shared dashboard that helps tell the combined “story of your stories” to internal and executive teams. Among the metrics to monitor:

  • Page views: Obviously, this queen of metrics continues to be important across PR and content marketing. Take your analysis to the next level by evaluating which niche audiences are contributing to these views to further hone your storytelling targets, including media outlets.
  • Earned media mentions: Through a media tracker service or good old Google Alerts, you can tally the echo of your content marketing and PR. Look at your site’s referral traffic report to identify media outlets that send traffic to your blog or other web pages.
  • Organic search queries: Dive into your analytics platform to surface organic search queries that lead to visitors. Build from those questions to develop stories that further resonate with your audience and your targeted media.
  • On-page actions: When visitors show up on your content, what are they doing? What do they click? Where do they go next? Building next-step pathways is your bread and butter in content marketing — and PR can use them as a natural pipeline for media to pick up more stories, angles, and quotes.

But perhaps the biggest metric to track is team satisfaction. Who on the collaborative team had the most fun writing blogs, producing videos, or calling the news stations? Lean into the natural skills and passions of your team members to distribute work properly, maximize the team output, and improve relationships with the media, your audience, and internal teams.

“It’s really trying to understand the problem to solve — the needle to move — and determining a plan that will help them achieve their goal,” Jason says. “If you don’t have those measurable objectives, you’re not going to know whether you made a difference.”

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Don’t fear the merger

Whether you deliberately work together or not, content marketing and public relations are tied together. ImpactLife’s Kirby Winn explains, “As soon as we begin to talk about (ourselves) to a reporter who doesn’t know us, they are certainly going to check out our stories.”

But consciously uniting PR and content marketing will ease the challenges you both face. Working together allows you to save time, eliminate duplicate work, and gain free time to tell more stories and drive them into impactful media placements.

Register to attend Content Marketing World in San Diego. Use the code BLOG100 to save $100. Can’t attend in person this year? Check out the Digital Pass for access to on-demand session recordings from the live event through the end of the year.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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