Commentary

Four Operational Audits You Should Perform Regularly

The word audit strikes fear in the hearts and minds of people throughout the U.S. this time of year. I’m not talking about tax audits however, but the audits you should be doing to evaluate your email program.

There are a lot of email programs out there with deep levels of sophistication.  Yet with technology in play, you need to proactively try to prevent problems — problems that could develop into a brand embarrassment, potentially causing revenue loss and increased customer attrition.

So put the following audit practices in place for your email program on a quarterly or biannual basis:

Acquisition Audit
Since this is your virtual welcome mat, it’s important to make sure everything in the acquisition process works as intended. Brands have broken acquisition sources and processes more than you’d imagine, causing disappointment to potential new subscribers right at the point when they’re ready to give permission.

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It’s important that you sign up for email in all the ways your customers can, and evaluate if all the experiences perform as intended. If you have a welcome email set up, do you receive it in the expected time frame? While you’re at it, does your welcome email need a refresh? Does the language in it convey the current messaging you want to communicate to all new customers?

Template Audit
If you are leveraging templates for your email program — and you should be, for consistency and efficiency — evaluate those to ensure:

-- They continue to render well across most environments
-- Header and footer links aren’t broken
-- Branding, messaging and footer language are still current

Integration Audit
Make sure all integrations between your ESP and other systems — and vice versa — are processing data properly and without latency. Since you probably have automations/triggers running and run batch campaigns using refreshed data, it’s critical that you keep an eye on the flow of information to and from your ESP to ensure that the integrity of your targeting is intact and without errors.  

Privacy Audit
With the ever-changing regulations across states and countries, it’s critical to check in with your privacy, legal and compliance teams at regular intervals to ensure your privacy policy, privacy statements in email and the process and verbiage at the point of acquisition meet the legal and regulatory standards of the locales your emails cover.

What operational audits do you perform at a regular cadence to keep your email program happily humming along?  Let me know in the comments!

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