The Email Marketing Audit We Run Before Taking Any Client
The five-part email marketing audit we run before taking any eCommerce client: deliverability, flow coverage, campaign balance, list health, and honest attribution.
On this page
Before we take any client, we audit their email account, and the audit finds the same leaks over and over: flows missing their jobs, campaigns doing all the work automation should, and revenue numbers that flatter the channel. Here's the exact five-part audit, so you can run it on your own account this week.
1. Deliverability: are you even reaching inboxes?
Check domain authentication, spam complaint trends, and whether engagement has drifted down over months. Everything else in email is decoration if the messages land in spam. The most common cause we see is simple: years of mailing everyone, including people who stopped opening long ago.
2. Flow coverage: does every job have an automation?
Map what exists against the seven core flows. The most expensive gap is almost always post-purchase: stores chase new carts while the second order, where the loyalty earned across the whole first experience shows, goes unworked. Check the abandoned cart flow can actually fire, too; without the onsite snippet it silently never does.
3. Campaign balance: is automation carrying its share?
Read a month of sends as a subscriber would. If every email is a promotion, the list is being farmed, not built. Healthy programs let flows do the always-on selling while campaigns carry launches, stories, and seasonal moments, and the send-to-value ratio stays defensible.
4. List health: who are you actually mailing?
Size the unengaged segment honestly and check a sunset flow exists. A list that shrinks to people who want the email beats a bigger one that drags deliverability down for everyone. Subtraction is a growth tactic here.
5. Attribution honesty: is the revenue real?
Platform dashboards happily credit email for orders that would have happened anyway. Cross-check attributed revenue against totals, watch what happens to sales when sends pause, and judge the program the way we judge everything: by what it adds to lifetime gross profit to CAC, cohort by cohort.
Want us to run it for you?
This audit is the first thing we do on every discovery call, on your real account, free. Book a discovery call and we'll show you exactly what's leaking revenue and what to fix first.
Frequently asked questions
- What does an email marketing audit cover?
- Five areas: deliverability (are you reaching inboxes), flow coverage (which automated jobs exist and which are missing), campaign balance (how sends split between automation and one-offs), list health (who you're mailing and who should be removed), and attribution honesty (whether the revenue email claims is real).
- Can we audit our own email account?
- Yes, in an afternoon. Map your flows against the core set, read your last month of campaign sends as a customer would, check your unengaged segment size, and compare email-attributed revenue against total revenue with a skeptical eye. The gaps announce themselves.
- How often should an email program be audited?
- Quarterly is enough once the core flows run. The exception is after any big change: a replatform, a rebrand, a list import, or a deliverability dip. Audit then, not after the quarter ends.
Want this run for your brand?
Hayes Media builds direct response creative, buys the media, and runs the email & SMS behind it.
Book a discovery call
