Benchmark and improve your email marketing
About our email marketing audit
- Authors: Tim Watson and Dave Chaffey
- Last updated: February 2012
- Format: Excel spreadsheet to score and identify improvements to your email marketing
- Download: Download now
How will the planning template help me and my business?
It’s hard to plan a route from A to B if you are not clear where you are now and even harder if you’re not sure exactly where B is anyway.
The aim of this health check is to provide a fast and systematic method of evaluating the use of email marketing within a company. It provides all the key questions that need to be considered within your email marketing strategy, broken down into:
- 1. Objectives and value
- 2. Evaluation
- 3. Email Communications strategy
- 4. Copy and design
- 5. Deliverability and permission
- 6. Governance
The health check is aimed at Marketing Directors, Managers and Agencies involved in email marketing. It has been boiled down from a more extensive and detailed evaluation process used when consulting.
Having a preset format and set criteria provides these benefits:
- Speed. Its quick to use
- Repeatable. Allows the evaluation periodically repeated to measure improvement
- Complete. Ensures nothing is missed, as compared to using adhoc evaluation
- Focused. Identifies the areas that need work
Once complete the true value of the health check is in interpreting the results and diving deeper, answering the questions that arise. The ultimate objective is to build a roadmap plan to improve email marketing activity.
The health check can be self-run, though you might consider walking through it with a colleague, your team or an external consultant. In doing so you will find increased value as the questions asked stimulates further and more insightful conversation.
About the author
This health check was developed by Tim Watson, Independent Email consultant at Zettasphere. Tim is a Smart Insights commentator on Email Marketing. It is a summary version developed in collaboration with Dave Chaffey of a more detailed email strategy review approach used with clients.
Do let us know any comments you have. Thanks!
Download Email marketing benchmark template
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About Smart Insights Templates
What make's our templates different?
The Smart Insights system for digital marketing improvement includes many templates to help you plan and manage your marketing. The templates are Word or Excel checklists to help you review a company's approach to digital marketing or Excel calculators and models to enable you to better plan digital marketing. All our templates are:- Focused on improvement – Each template will support you to review current ways of working and recommend improvements.
- Available in Word or Excel – Supplied in the most commonly used apps, they can be imported into other programmes.
- Provided as an unbranded template – Unlike our guides, these templates are plain, so you can easily modify to add your own company logo
- Field-tested – Dave Chaffey and the authoring team have years of experience in online marketing, we know the questions that need answering, so that's we include
How will the templates help me?
Our templates are designed to be used as "live documents" to help you and your team when planning or managing digital marketing. This is how our guides help:- Company owners and marketing managers - many of templates cover planning and strategy.
- Digital marketing and Ecommerce managers - as well as planning and strategy you can audit specific digital channels like search or social media marketing with our templates.
- Digital marketing specialists - templates are available for each of the main digital channels, so whether you work on Social media marketing, SEO, PPC, email marketing or conversion rate optimisation for the website there is a template to help. If there isn't, get in touch and we can develop one .
- Consultants and agency specialists - review your own techniques and process against the best practice templates to help you provide structured insights and recommendations for clients.
