What does an emailing audit look like? Example at L'Équipe with guest star Manon!

First, a little background...

The Team and Badsender, it's a story that started just one year ago, in March 2019. The famous French daily sports newspaper, asked Badsender to equip ourselves with our email builder Le Patron in order to easily create emailings. The design of the master template was done by the design team of L'Équipe and Gregory van Gilsen, our favorite CTO, took care of the integration and the parameterization of the template in Le Patron.

December 2019, Manon Finco, Loyalty Officer at L'ÉquipeThe company expressed the need to be accompanied on the strategic part of the email. The Team wanted a very concrete analysis with recos applicable the day after theaudit emailing. In short, concrete, concrete, concrete!
The idea was to analyze the emails that are sent in a punctual way (commercial emails, editorial newsletters, podcast...) and in an automated way (triggers, scenarios).

To complete the context, the team is equipped with the routing tool Selligent for sending emails (hey, by the way, we have a document that benchmarks 18 tools on the market).

The audit: here we go!

We therefore conducted an audit of their emailing activity.
On January 14th, I went to spend nearly 3 hours in the offices of L'Équipe to collect the information I needed to perform the audit. Here is the process of an audit step by step:

1. Define qualitative and quantitative objectives (when there are some...)
2. Check the deliverability Sending test on a seedlist via the 250ok tool to know where the emails are delivered: do they arrive in inbox, in spam box or are they completely undelivered? and all this by email system (Note that for Gmail, we can know if the emails arrive in the Promotions or Inbox tab). We also check if the signatures SPF, DKIM, DMARC are correctly set up.
3. Analysis of the different sources of email address collection (the forms)
4. Analysis of the data available in the routing tool (access is requested when possible)
5. Analysis of the performance of their emailing activity: unique open rates, unique satisfied click rates, dissatisfaction rate but also (and especially) the volume of emails sent, campaigns sent, openers and clickers. All these stats, broken down by campaign type and targeting.
6. Email and performance analysis : subject, preheader, usability, editorial content and stats. (Note that we did not analyze the HTML content of their emails since everything is done via Le Patron. We are sure of our code for the blow ;-))
7. Analysis of the sending schedule (we check the commercial pressure), targeting strategy (we review the segments), and for recovery.
8. Analysis of relational scenarios : trigger, timing, sequence, email content
9. Recommendations on emails and scenarios already in place
10. Recommendations on missing elements to be put in place
11. Prioritization of all reco in time according to the objectives defined in the first step

Restitution of the audit

One month later, on February 13, I went to present the results of the audit to three people: Manon, Virginia Maurin, Loyalty and Customer Relations Manager, and Vincent Doulaud, Acquisition Manager.

During the 4 hours and 45 minutes of feedback ???? we listed 3 types of recommendations:

1/ Very concrete actions, applicable the next day

Like:
- Favour short emails
- A CTA in the main block, always
- Make your emails readable with a series of pictograms, numbers
- Visuals with more emotions, more people, more situations. Highlight the team's advantages and expertise in the visuals and taglines
- Include videos, animated gifs, countdowns at the top of emails to capture attention.
- Systematic A/B test on the object at least
- Relaunch campaigns on the most committed contacts: openers and recently logged in

2/ Actions that can be implemented quickly but require some thought

Like:
- Create segments: New subscribers (1st time), Ex-subscribers - 6 months, Ex-subscribers + 6 months, Never subscribers, Loyal customers (from the 2nd subscription)
Birthday email
- Set up headers according to the type of communication
- Set up headers and footers according to the status of the contacts: subscriber / non-subscriber
- Extend the welcome scenario by including an interest gathering email and a communication transaprence email
-…

3/ Finally, actions that require the implementation of additional tags or flows

- cart abandonment email
- email retargeting
- PRM scenario / discovery offer
-…

And this is to finish the roadmap of L'Equipe for this year :

In any case, it was a real pleasure to accompany L'Équipe and the pleasure seems to have been shared!

We are delighted with the audit carried out by Marion on both the acquisition and loyalty part. Marion made a complete analysis of our emails while bringing us a clear vision of the good practices and the current trends of emailing. This restitution was really dense, concrete and rich in examples. We found it in line with our business sector and our development possibilities. We learned a lot from it, especially about the wording and the layout of our messages. Today we regularly consult it for the creation of our new emailing. This audit also helps us to think about the extension of our current scenarios.

Manon Finco, Loyalty Officer at L'Équipe