Regular maintenance—whether it’s a yearly health exam or a 30,000-mile service for your car—keeps everything running smoothly. The same principle applies at work, including in email marketing.

An email marketing audit is one of those tasks marketers know they should do but don’t get to regularly. Over time, performance naturally declines, with deliverability dropping as protocols evolve, engagement falling as users abandon old email accounts, and templates starting to look stale.

Without regular checkups, small issues compound. An email marketing audit helps you catch these problems early—before they become expensive headaches that slow your marketing engine. Here’s how to perform an effective email marketing audit and keep your program running at peak performance.

What is an email marketing audit?

An email marketing audit is a systematic review of every component of your email program. It identifies what’s working, what’s not, and where performance or revenue may be slipping. The audit process examines everything from technical deliverability issues to content performance, email list health, and compliance with email marketing regulations. 

Many email marketers focus on crafting campaigns, testing subject lines, and analyzing last week’s results. But the best strategists go deeper, looking under the hood and checking the vital signs of their entire email marketing program via an email marketing audit. 

Think of it as a full tune-up that helps you spot underlying issues early and boost your long-term marketing performance. 

Types of email marketing audits

• Deliverability audit
• Content and design audit
• List health audit
• Compliance audit
• Performance audit

Every email marketing program has different needs, but most audits fall into one of five main categories. Each focuses on a specific area of your program, helping you pinpoint where issues are developing and create a clear action plan for improvement:

Deliverability audit

If your messages aren’t reaching inboxes, it’s time for a deliverability audit. This review checks technical vital signs like email authentication protocols, sender reputation, bounce rates, and spam placement. According to marketing intelligence provider Validity, 65% of email professionals say deliverability is becoming more difficult—a sign this checkup matters. 

Content and design audit

When emails look strange or perform inconsistently, a content and design audit helps identify the cause. This audit reviews your email templates, subject lines, and messaging, and tests how your messages render across different email clients. Are your emails desktop-perfect but breaking on mobile? Are calls to action (CTAs) clear or cluttered? This process ensures the look and feel of your campaigns stay in top condition.

List health audit 

A list health audit checks the pulse of your subscriber base. Is your audience growing with real, engaged readers? Or have bots, inactive accounts, or poor segmentation slowed circulation? Regular email list cleaning and better segmentation can restore healthy engagement and improve deliverability.

Compliance audit

A compliance audit ensures your program follows best practices and complies with laws, like the CAN-SPAM Act and other email marketing regulations. It checks for functional unsubscribe links, accurate sender information that clearly identifies your business, and proper management of opt-in consent. A good compliance audit ensures unsubscribe options are easy to find and use—no buried links or confusing wording. Respecting subscriber preferences protects both your reputation and your deliverability. 

Performance audit

If you’re unsure what is and isn’t working in your email marketing campaigns, a performance audit connects the dots. It combines insights from deliverability, content, and list health audits to evaluate how your strategy contributes to engagement and revenue. This audit looks for timing patterns, subject-line performance, and conversion trends to reveal which campaigns deliver the strongest results and where there’s room to optimize.

How to conduct an email marketing audit

1. Gather all the data
2. Follow the problems, not a predetermined list
3. Test what the data can’t tell you
4. Document what you find and create an action plan

A comprehensive email marketing audit follows a systematic process. You’re not just pulling random reports, but methodically reviewing each element of your email marketing strategy to find what needs fixing. Here’s how it’s done: 

1. Gather all the data

Pull reports from your email marketing platform for the past six to 12 months. You want engagement metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. Get deliverability data such as bounce rates and spam complaints. Look at list health information such as growth rate, churn, and inactive subscribers.

Get campaign-level data but also aggregate performance across your entire email marketing program. If you use marketing automation platforms or customer relationship management (CRM) systems that tie into your email, pull that data too. You want to see the full picture of how email fits into your overall marketing strategy and customer journey.

2. Follow the problems, not a predetermined list 

Once you have your baseline, look for what’s declining or broken. Are your open rates dropping month over month? That could point to a deliverability issue or problems with your content—or both. Do you have high bounce rates? It may be time to check your email list health and ensure you don’t have inactive subscribers and invalid email addresses bogging you down. 

Deliverability, content, list health, compliance, and performance audits aren’t separate tasks you work through one by one. They’re different angles you use to investigate the problems your data reveals. For example, if engagement looks fine but conversions are down, skip the deliverability deep-dive and focus on your content and automation program instead.

3. Test what the data can’t tell you

Numbers show you what’s happening, not why. This is where hands-on testing matters. Sign up for your own emails and see what your email clients actually get. Test how your email templates render across different email clients. What looks perfect in Gmail might break in Outlook.

Are your CTAs clear? Is the content and design cohesive? If you use workflow automation, map out your automated emails and drip campaigns. Abandon a cart and see which automations are triggered. These can help catch real-world glitches that analytics don’t always reveal.

4. Document findings and create an action plan

Once you’ve reviewed everything, organize your findings. What’s working well that you should do more of? What’s broken and needs immediate fixing? What’s mediocre and could improve with optimization?

Prioritize issues by impact. A broken unsubscribe link or failing authentication is urgent. Tweaking your subject line approach is important but not critical.

Create a clear action plan and assign tasks to specific people on your email marketing team with set deadlines. The audit is valuable only if you actually fix what you find. Document everything so the entire email marketing team knows what needs to happen and why.

Tips for an effective email marketing audit

• Use email testing tools
• Know which metrics matter
• Audit the customer journey
• Schedule regular checkups

These tips help you get the most out of the email marketing audit process, from knowing which tools actually catch problems to understanding which metrics deserve your attention. The goal isn’t just to identify what’s broken but to build habits that keep your email program healthy long term:

Use email testing tools

Your email templates may look perfect in your inbox, but how do they appear in Outlook, on an Android phone, or in Yahoo Mail with images blocked? Email testing tools like Litmus or Email on Acid act as diagnostic scanners for your campaigns. They reveal rendering issues across different email clients and devices, broken layouts, and deliverability problems before subscribers notice them. When you conduct an email marketing audit, test your most used templates across all major email clients. You’ll often uncover hidden issues you didn’t know existed.

Know which metrics matter

Your email marketing platform likely tracks dozens of numbers, but focusing on the right metrics during your audit makes the difference between gathering useful insights and drowning in data:

• Open rate. The percentage of recipients who open your emails. The ecommerce average is around 31%, but your own baseline is a better benchmark.

• Click-through rate (CTR). The percentage of recipients who click a link after opening your email. This shows how compelling your content and CTAs are. The 2024 ecommerce average was 1.74%. 

• Conversion rate. The percentage of recipients who complete your desired action, such as making a purchase, downloading content, or signing up. Conversion rate connects email engagement directly to revenue.

• Bounce rate. The percentage of emails that couldn’t be delivered. Hard bounces (invalid addresses) should stay under 2%. Soft bounces (temporary issues) are normal but worth monitoring for patterns.

• Unsubscribe rate. The percentage of recipients who opt out of your emails. Some churn is expected, but spikes suggest content or frequency issues.

• Spam complaint rate. The percentage of recipients marking your email as spam. Keep this number as low as possible to protect deliverability and sender reputation.

• List growth rate. The rate at which your list grows after accounting for unsubscribes and bounces. Healthy lists grow steadily over time.

• Email deliverability rate. The percentage of emails that reach inboxes instead of spam folders. Strong deliverability ensures your other metrics remain meaningful.

Focus on trends, not snapshots. Industry benchmarks can provide context, but your historical data tells the real story and is the best measure of your email marketing performance. For example, if your average open rate dropped from 35% to 25%, something is off, even if 25% still exceeds your industry average.

Audit the customer journey

Most email audits focus on campaign-level metrics, but the bigger picture—the full customer journey—matters. Map what a new subscriber experiences over their first 30 days: a welcome series, regular newsletters, promotions, or abandoned cart messages. Are they receiving too much, too soon? Are messages overlapping or conflicting? Look at how your automated campaigns and regular sends interact. Viewing your email ecosystem holistically often reveals problems that individual campaign reports miss.

Schedule regular checkups

Too many teams conduct an email marketing audit only when something breaks—deliverability tanks, conversions fall, or leadership demands answers. Help prevent that by adding regular email marketing audits to the calendar. A comprehensive audit annually, with quarterly mini-audits to review key performance indicators and list health, is a good way to catch small issues before they become big problems.

The audit process becomes faster each time because you’re not starting from scratch. You’re checking if the fixes you made last time worked and looking for new issues. Regular audits also give you clean data to compare against, making it easier to spot trends.