How to audit your email automations for revenue gaps

Missing or underperforming automated email flows quietly cost many brands revenue. An audit can uncover those gaps, strengthen deliverability, and identify the lifecycle automations that drive more engagement, repeat purchases, and long-term growth.

Even brands with experienced in-house teams often miss opportunities in their automation programs. A comprehensive audit can produce meaningful gains without increasing send volume or investing in new technology.

Start by reviewing your technical foundation, then evaluate your highest-impact flows, your ESP’s built-in capabilities, and testing opportunities to improve performance over time.

Audit your technical email fundamentals

Major inboxes like Gmail and Yahoo now use AI to decide in real time whether your email lands in the primary inbox, gets buried in promotions, or gets skipped altogether. Weak fundamentals don’t just risk landing you in spam folders anymore. They now actively teach AI algorithms to deprioritize your emails.

Start by evaluating the foundation of your email deliverability and message rendering before moving on to the flows built on top of it. Look for:

• A dedicated domain: If you’re using a shared domain and plan to send emails at scale, you’re at greater risk of getting classified as spam or routed to folders outside the primary inbox. A dedicated domain is strongly recommended for long-term deliverability.
• Authentication configuration: Test your DMARC, DKIM, and SPF configuration to confirm everything is set up correctly and help keep your emails out of spam folders.
• Functional templates: We’ve all received emails with broken images, and ADA noncompliant emails are even more common. As recently as 2024, well over 99% of email campaigns had significant accessibility issues, despite ADA compliance being the law.

Check your live templates for ADA compliance, image and link integrity, and one step too many marketers skip: test sends across every device and email client.

Review your existing flows

The technical base won’t drive growth on its own. Chances are you already have at least a start on flows, even if it’s just a couple of thank-you or welcome emails, but if you suspect things aren’t fully optimized, they aren’t.

I’ll go in order of revenue impact with the following list. Build and thoroughly test one flow at a time to give yourself bandwidth to make progress without rushing and skipping steps.

On-site activity and high-intent page visits

You likely have far more users who visit high-intent pages (e.g., product, pricing, or demo) and stop there. Re-engaging those folks is a growth opportunity with more scale.

Cart and checkout abandonment

Adding an item to the cart and starting the checkout process are two distinct behaviors that require different flows to optimize conversions. 

A high volume of checkout abandonment should also trigger a broader audit of the checkout experience from a buyer and UX perspective. Even if that responsibility doesn’t sit with the email team, communicate what you’re seeing to the relevant stakeholders.

Post-purchase

Too many email marketers stop at the purchase, and this is a big missed opportunity. Repeat business is key to sustainable profitability because it’s far more efficient than acquiring new customers.

Email is a key tool for strengthening the bond between the brand and the customer and boosting affinity that leads to future transactions.

Re-engagement

These flows are as important for defending deliverability as they are for driving new revenue. If subscribers who have gone dormant after a clearly defined period aren’t segmented into their own flows, they’ll suppress overall engagement and increase the risk of deliverability issues. They need to be split into their own segment with customized re-engagement messaging and a fallback plan to remove them from sends altogether.

Repeat purchasers

Showing a little appreciation to repeat purchasers may seem like preaching to the choir, but it’s worth the effort to retain your best customers and strengthen loyalty. 

Flows that remind users to cash in rewards, deliver product usage tips, and/or offer something of value as a thank-you will help strengthen the bond between your brand and your most valuable audience.

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Get more from your ESP

ESPs, like any martech tool, love to tout new features and product roadmaps. Focus on the features you should already be using rather than rushing to integrate the next great thing.

Send time optimization

These days, every ESP we encounter uses AI to predict the optimal send time for each recipient. The benefits are real: open rates improve with no additional ask of your creative team.

Smart sending

This function sets up guardrails so you can’t spam subscribers with too many messages within a short window.

Channel affinity routing (for multi-channel campaigns)

If you have active email and SMS campaigns, these tools assess where each subscriber is most likely to engage and route messages to the appropriate channel.

Preference centers

Especially as part of a welcome flow, preference centers are highly effective at helping marketers collect data on interests and communication preferences. 

A CPG food company, for instance, can collect data that helps it deliver relevant recipes. A suburban dad who wants to feed his kids snacks after soccer practice will probably have different uses for premium cheddar cheese than a single urban socialite who loves throwing themed parties.

Test variables within flows

Within your campaigns, we recommend testing the following variables:

• Time of day/day of week.
• Intervals between emails.
• Subject lines and preview copy.
• Discount offers versus non-discount content.
• Sequence length.
• Generic versus personalized content (we’ve seen each scenario win)

Before you run each test, make sure you know exactly what you’re hoping to learn. And remember that even failed tests can teach you something.

Turn your audit into action

Go one step at a time once you have the audit findings. Making progress with setting up basic flows and shoring up your technical foundation can lead to double- or even triple-digit percentage gains in engagement, clicks, and revenue. 

Treat each flow as a starting point, test the variables listed above, and add complexity, as long as there’s a purpose, as you go, and your email marketing automations should be a great, dependable source of revenue within a matter of months.