Common Problems that Email Audits Turn Up

If you decide to put your e-mail program through an e-mail audit or self-assessment, such as third-party certification you will probably turn up problems with your list acquisition, disclosure policies, bounce management, or subscriber consent. One or all of these problems can affect delivery. When you have an email audit, the common problems occur within the opt-in procedures, delivery management, and privacy policies.

With list acquisitions, the primary problem is with how you are acquiring your email addresses. It is very important to confirm the opt-in. Use the double opt-in methods. Every email message includes an unsubscribe link as required by CAN-SPAM, but if the link fails to remove the subscriber from the list because it was scripted incorrectly or it does not coordinate unsubscribes with the database. The way to fix this if it has been going on for a while is that you must reacquire permission through a confirmation message or other opt-in mechanism. These confirmation messages do not necessarily need to be sent to your whole list if you can isolate the users who were presented with the malfunctioning unsubscribe links. To prevent this in the future, use an email service provider (ESP) for database management. Email Service Providers have extensive tools and options for subscription, suppression, and bounce handling.

Be careful that your email policies are consistent. Many times a business will say one thing regarding how they will use the email address when the recipient opts-in but they state something different in their privacy policy or terms of service, that will give them more leeway with the addresses. The registration page says the company will use email addresses only to send the messages the subscriber wants, but service terms allow the company to send general messages or third-party ads at will. The way to fix this is to update customer-facing policies to be consistent with your marketing practices and provide notice to existing users. Managing consumer expectations poorly results in spam complaints, which jeopardize your mailings. For privacy and sensitive issues, such as sharing your list members’ information with third parties, distribute a confirmation e-mail to gather permission from your users to share their information.

Another problem that email audits uncover is the transferring of email lists to other partners or subdivisions within the company. The majority of Internet Marketing businesses have a form or process for recipients to unsubscribe from their services and while this is great, it is important to have a way to handle the process of removing bounces. Simply having a link that allows the recipient to unsubscribe is not enough; you also need a way to make sure the addresses are removed from your subscriber database. To fix this problem you can update your existing policies to reflect your practices and set expectations upfront. If email policies change after you have already acquired a sizeable list, provide users with notice and choice. Send a campaign to the affected recipients notifying them of the policy changes and the additional messages they might receive. Use this as an opportunity to highlight the benefits of your other newsletters and offers. Ideally, you will drive readers to a preference page that lets them update preferred subscription options.

Another form of auditing is to email newsletter audits. This can be an effective method to uncover areas affecting the lack of response to your marketing campaign. You can look for five areas to evaluate when you audit such as, value, copy deliverability, CAN-SPAM compliance, and metrics.

• How valuable is your email to your target audience? Are you delivering the right information into the right demographics to achieve the most success?
• Does your target audience find the information beneficial as something they need or are interested in receiving?
• Do you use words usually blocked in spam filters? Is your html emails properly coded? This is important, without realizing it you could actually be losing addresses and risk being reported to you Internet Service Provider.
• When you are sending out your email campaign, are you complying with the legal requirements outlined in the CAN-SPAM act?
• You may want to evaluate your click-through and subscription rates. If they are not what you think, they should be take action to improve areas of your campaign emails.

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