RE:markable is the weekly email about emails. Dropping the latest email marketing news, updates, insights, free resources, upcoming masterclasses, webinars, and of course, a little inbox mischief.
10–14 minute read (depending on how many rabbit holes you enjoy)
Most email audits fail for one simple reason: Marketers audit what they can see - not what people actually experience.
So we stare at open rates, click rates, subject lines, campaign calendars, heatmaps, and templates. We rewrite CTAs, we change button colours (or move them higher - lol), we “refresh the design”, we debate send times like it’s the stock market.
Meanwhile, your subscribers are experiencing something completely different:
And none of that shows up neatly in your ESP dashboard (because they are rubbbbbish).
This is why you can “optimise” for months and still feel like email is plateauing. You’re adjusting the visible layer while the lived experience stays messy.
So let’s talk about what a real email audit looks like. Not a metrics audit. Not a content audit. An experience audit, across all external comms, because your audience does not care which system or team sent what.
To them, there is just one brand or business they are receiving emails from.
Here’s the bit teams forget: email isn’t just “marketing sends”.
Your subscriber might receive messages from:
That is one inbox experience. One stream & one relationship.
So if you audit only your marketing sends, you miss the real story: collision, confusion, and inconsistency across the whole comms ecosystem.
And if you’re sat there wondering why engagement is down, while your customer is getting:
…then yes. Engagement will drop.
Not because your subject lines are weak, but because your experience design is.
A consumer inbox is often noisy, promotional, and dopamine-driven. People are trained to expect offers, discounts, and a sense of urgency. They skim fast, delete faster, and treat most brand emails as background noise until they need something.
A work inbox is task-heavy, decision-heavy, and interruption-heavy. People are triaging constantly: what needs action, what can wait, what can be ignored safely.
Different environment mean different rules.
But both share one thing: the inbox is a utility environment. It’s not a browsing space, people go there to deal with things, not explore your brand’s creative direction for the week.
Your emails are judged in a brutal context you don’t control:
This is why I say engagement is not a action, it's acondition.
And your audit should focus on the conditions.
Most attribution models assume people behave like spreadsheets - sorry, but they don't.
People behave like humans with memory, context, competing priorities, and delayed action.
Let’s talk about the real world for a second.
Email impact is often cumulative, not immediate.
It’s also often indirect. Email supports other channels by increasing brand recall, reinforcing messaging, nudging people back into the journey, and keeping you mentally available.
So when you rely on last-click, platform-native dashboards, or “revenue attributed” within the ESP, you are measuring the narrowest, most convenient slice of the truth.
Not because you’re incompetent, because the tools are not built for nuance.
This is the part marketers intuitively know but struggle to defend.
Email doesn’t just “convert”. It:
Builds mental availability:
Being seen consistently matters. A lot of email’s value is memory-based: recognition, familiarity, and trust accumulation. People choose the brand they remember when they finally need the thing.
Reinforces positioning:
Even if someone doesn’t click, they absorb tone, worldview, proof points, and differentiation. Email is one of the few channels where you can repeatedly shape perception.
Creates momentum across the journey:
Welcome flows, onboarding, education sequences, and retention journeys move people forward. The influence is often gradual, not “this email = this sale.”
Reduces friction:
Good lifecycle emails help people complete tasks: find info, understand value, feel confident, and take action. That impact doesn’t always show up as a click.
Supports other channels:
Email can lift direct traffic, brand search, content consumption, and pipeline velocity. The action often happens elsewhere, but the influence starts in the inbox.
So if your measurement only captures “clicked from email and converted in the same session”, you are ignoring a massive chunk of email’s real job. Which means the business undervalues it, over-demands from it, and misdiagnoses it when performance shifts.
This myth is responsible for so much unnecessary panic. Clicks are not “impact.” Clicks are one type of action that happens when someone is ready and your email is the most convenient route.
Plenty of people:
Email isn’t just a performance channel, it's an awareness and relationship channel too.
If your leadership expects every email to “perform”, you will end up designing emails for the dashboard, not for humans, and the channel will decay.
Now for the practical bit. This is the part you can actually use.
You do not need perfect attribution. You need credible measurement that reflects reality, and that helps you make better decisions.
Here’s how to do that:
This is the job!
Your job isn’t to “send emails”. Your job is to design a coherent communication experience over time that:
If you approach auditing from this angle, everything changes. Because now you’re not just asking: “what did we send?”
You’re asking: “what did it feel like to receive all of this?”
A collision is when messages overlap in a way that creates confusion, redundancy, or emotional whiplash.
A collision happens when:
Collision isn’t just “too many emails”. It’s too many mismatched signals.
A good audit identifies collision points and redesigns the system so the experience makes sense.
This is the part you asked for: practical steps, real questions, and a process you can run (even if you’re a team of one).
If you do nothing else, do this:
Then answer:
This one exercise often reveals more than a month of dashboard staring.
Email is not just output, it is experience.
And if you are responsible for email, you are responsible for designing that experience — intentionally, coherently, and with respect for how humans actually use inboxes.
So before you optimise subject lines, before you redesign templates, before you chase clicks:
Audit what people live through in their real lives.
Because when the experience is clear, calm, and aligned… performance is a byproduct.
RE:markable is the weekly email about emails. Dropping the latest email marketing news, updates, insights, free resources, upcoming masterclasses, webinars, and of course, a little inbox mischief.