You’ve probably heard this stat more times than you can count:
“Email marketing has the highest ROI of any marketing channel.”
It’s still true, by the way, but only when your email strategy is dialed in.
And let’s be honest—are you really squeezing all the value you possibly can from your email marketing?
Are you continually innovating, thinking strategically, and building systems that drive long-term results?
Or are you…
Stuck in Email Marketing “Survival Mode”?
At the Smart Marketer Agency, we run a high-level mastermind where we get to look under the hood of dozens and dozens of successful businesses. And I see the same thing over and over again:
Marketers are stuck in survival mode.
They find themselves racing from promotion to promotion, maybe tossing in the occasional content email, but never finding the time to think strategically about:
- Automation
- List health
- Or long-term growth
If you’re stuck in a rut like this, here’s your next step: run an email marketing audit.
An audit helps you step back from the day-to-day hustle so you can see the big picture, spot missed opportunities, and start to put together a roadmap for improvement. It’s a powerful reset button that puts you back in the driver’s seat.
At Smart Marketer, we break our email audits into 4 key pillars:
Email Audit Pillar 1: Monetization
Let’s start with the obvious: you need to be tracking your email revenue. If you don’t know how much money each email is making, it’s nearly impossible to optimize.
Beyond that, one of the most important metrics to look at is the split between broadcast revenue and automation revenue.
Broadcast Revenue vs. Automation Revenue
Ideally, you want a healthy balance here, with 40–60% of revenue coming from each.
Too many businesses rely on broadcasts to drive the majority of email revenue. And it makes sense—broadcasts deliver fast, visible results.
Automations, on the other hand, are a slow burn. A snowball effect. They don’t deliver overnight spikes. But over time, they build real momentum—creating a steady, scalable revenue engine that runs in the background.
The problem? Many businesses stop short.
They’ll launch a welcome discount flow, maybe a cart abandonment flow… and that’s it. As a result, they end up missing out on 60-70% of the revenue they could be earning from automations.
Want a few quick wins to start ? These have been 2 of my favorite tactics lately:
Quick Win #1: Evergreen Your Best Promos
Take your highest-converting promos and turn them into automated flows for new customers. Use dynamic coupons to maintain real urgency without undermining your product’s value.
Quick Win #2: More Personalized Automations
Ask subscribers for their birthday. Then, when the day comes, send them a free gift (usually a dollar-off amount). It’s simple, effective, and builds goodwill.
Email Audit Pillar 2: Automation (Revisited)
I just touched on this, but automation deserves its own spotlight.
The beauty of automation is that it runs on autopilot. The danger of automation is… that it runs on autopilot.
Too often, businesses forget to go back and optimize their automated flows, and that’s how easy money gets left on the table. So remember to revisit them regularly and continue to make improvements over time.
Every time you launch a new product, for example, you’re unlocking new cross-sell opportunities that you’ll want to bake into your automated flows.
Set aside some time on your calendar to check in on your automations, so you can:
- Look for places to insert new cross-sells or upsells
- Run regular A/B tests to improve performance
- And look for other little improvements that can compound over time
This is especially important if you’re still striving to achieve that 40/60 split in your email revenue.
Email Audit Pillar 3: Promotions
Promotions are where a big chunk of email revenue comes from—but too many businesses fall into a trap here:
They sell their products the same way every time.
10% off.
15% off.
Buy one, get one half off.
These are all just different shades of the same offer.
It’s not a bad offer. But instead of repeating it over and over again, you’ll get much better results by offering a wider variety of promotions that appeal to a wider audience.
(This is especially important for brands with only a few products to sell.)
Remember: the more varied your offers, the more reasons you give people to take action. So create different types of offers, not just different discount amounts. Try:
- A presell article with an educational angle
- A limited-time challenge
- A case study or customer story
- Free shipping with purchase
- Trial memberships or bundles
Want to learn more about how to create a variety of effective offers to help scale your business? Check out these posts:
- The Evergreen Ecommerce Offer System: Diversify Your Offers to Unlock Scale and Increase AOV, CLV & ROAS
- How to Create Winning Offers: John Grimshaw’s Proven Offer Formula
- DTC Brands to Watch: How Whym Travel Won in a “Dead” Market by Crafting a Brilliant Offer
And remember: one email is never enough.
In past tests, we’ve found that only 28% of revenue came from the first email. The remaining 72% came from the follow-ups. Repetition sells.
Email Audit Pillar 4: List Quality
List quality doesn’t get enough love, which is unfortunate, because it’s more important than ever.
Email deliverability and engagement are tough these days—thanks to updates like Gmail’s Promotions tab, Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection, and of course, the ever-more-crowded inbox—making it easy to get lost in the mix.
If you’re not actively managing your list, engagement will erode (and deliverability along with it).
So what should you do?
Quick Win #1: Clean your list regularly
Stop sending to people who have gone cold. It hurts your deliverability.
Quick Win #2: Encourage more engagement (especially clicks)
Clicks send a strong signal to inbox providers that people value your emails. Try to incentivize authentic clicks from your audience.
Once, I was looking at a student’s emails. They did a great job of creating valuable content. Solid open rates. But the problem was, people had no reason to click.
I suggested a simple thumbs-up button: “Enjoy this content? Click here to let us know!”
There are 1,001 more things I could say on list quality, but the #1 thing to focus on first is incentivizing authentic clicks.
And remember…
Incentivize clicks, yes. But you still want to pack some value in there.
You don’t want every message to be a clickbait-type tease. That might work short-term, but long-term it can erode trust.
Make Email Audits a Habit
Now that you know the 4 pillars of an email audit, don’t forget the most important part: actually doing this audit on a regular basis.
At Smart Marketer, we run an audit every 3-4 months for agency clients and once a year for Mastermind members.
Find a cadence that works for you. But don’t just do this audit once and forget about it, because the real value comes from repeating it again and again. That’s what helps you keep a finger on the pulse of your email performance.
Thanks for reading!
