Email Marketing Audit Checklist for Ecommerce Brands

Start with email’s share of store revenue

Every email audit starts with one number. Take the last 90 days of Shopify revenue and work out how much of it the email platform can claim, using the same attribution window on both sides. That share tells you whether you are auditing a program that needs fixing or one that needs building.

At Toups & Co, email is 55% of revenue. That did not happen by sending more campaigns. It happened because every item on this list was in place and checked.

Write the number down before you open a single flow. You will compare against it at the end.

Deliverability comes first because nothing else counts if you are in spam

If your emails land in spam, the rest of the audit is measuring a program nobody sees. Fix this before you judge any flow or campaign.

• The sending domain is a branded subdomain (send.yourbrand.com or similar), not a shared platform domain.
• SPF, DKIM and DMARC are all set up and passing. Google and Yahoo have required all three for bulk senders since 2024, and a missing one is enough to throttle you.
• Spam complaint rate in Google Postmaster Tools stays under 0.3%, and ideally under 0.1%.
• One-click unsubscribe is live and the link works on a phone.
• The list has been cleaned in the last 90 days. Hard bounces are suppressed and anyone with no open or click in a long window is out of the regular send.
• Campaign sends go to engaged segments by default, not to the whole list.

Our email deliverability guide walks through each of these in detail, including what to do when you are already in spam.

Is the list growing, and are the right people on it

A program with no new subscribers is a program that shrinks every month. Check the top of the funnel before you judge the flows that depend on it.

• Signup form conversion rate is measured, and the form has been tested in the last six months. Most brands set one up at launch and never touch it.
• The offer on the form is a real reason to subscribe, and it does not undercut the offer in paid ads or on the site.
• Email and SMS capture are either combined in one form or sequenced, not two popups fighting on the same page.
• Checkout opt-in is on and pre-checked where the law allows, so every buyer becomes a subscriber.
• New subscribers from paid traffic are tagged by source, so you can see which ads build the list and which only buy a one-time sale.

Do the core flows exist, and are they doing the work

Flows are the automated emails that fire on a trigger, and they should carry most of your email revenue with no weekly effort. Most accounts have the flows turned on. Fewer have them finished.

Two more checks that cut across every flow. Each flow has a revenue number you can read for the last 90 days, and each has been edited at least once since launch. A flow nobody has opened in a year is a flow nobody has improved.

Are campaigns going to people who open them

Campaigns are the emails you send by hand: launches, promotions, content. They are where most of the hours go and where most of the damage to deliverability happens.

• There is a calendar. Sends are planned at least two weeks ahead and tied to launches, inventory and the paid calendar, not written the morning they go out.
• The default audience is an engaged segment. The full list gets a send only on the biggest days of the year, if at all.
• Subject lines or send times are tested on real campaigns, and someone reads the results.
• Every campaign has one job and one main link. A campaign with six offers is a newsletter nobody finishes.
• Revenue per recipient is tracked by campaign, so a smaller send to the right people can beat a big send to everyone.

Does segmentation reflect how customers actually behave

Segments are the saved groups you send to. The audit question is whether they exist for the things that matter and whether anyone uses them.

• Engaged segments exist at more than one window (recent openers, recent clickers, recent buyers) and campaigns default to one of them.
• A VIP segment exists, defined by spend or order count, and it gets treated differently.
• Buyers and non-buyers are separated in every flow where the message should differ.
• Suppression segments exist for recent buyers, so nobody gets a sale email the day after paying full price.
• Segment sizes are checked quarterly. A segment that has not changed size in a year is probably broken.

Does the design survive a phone screen

Most of your list reads on a phone, in a dark room, between two other things. The audit is a thumb test, not a design review.

• Templates are mobile first. Two-column product grids, not three. Buttons big enough to hit with a thumb.
• Headlines and body copy are live text, not baked into images, so the email still reads with images off and still works for screen readers.
• Images have alt text and are compressed. A hero image over a few hundred kilobytes is why the email looked blank for the first three seconds.
• Dark mode has been checked. Logos on transparent backgrounds vanish on black.
• The footer has the physical address and the unsubscribe link, and the preheader text is written, not left as the first line of the body.

Does the reporting tell the truth

This is where audits usually find the biggest surprise. The email platform grades its own homework, and the grades are generous.

• Attributed revenue is reconciled against Shopify orders at least monthly. The platform books a campaign’s revenue on the day it was sent, while Shopify books it on the order date, so the two will never match day by day. The 90-day totals should be close.
• The attribution window is known and deliberate. Klaviyo’s default is five days for email. Make sure the same window is used when email and ads argue over the same order.
• Flow revenue and campaign revenue are read separately. If campaigns carry most of email revenue, the flows are not finished.
• Placed-order rate per recipient is the campaign metric that matters, not open rate. Open rates have been unreliable since Apple started pre-loading emails in 2021.
• Someone reads the numbers monthly and changes something because of them. A report nobody acts on is a PDF.

What to do with the results

Fix in the order the audit runs. Deliverability first, because every later fix is invisible if the email never arrives. Then the welcome and abandoned checkout flows, which produce the fastest revenue change. Then list growth, because the flows need people to work on. Campaigns, segmentation and design come after, and reporting runs alongside all of it.

Most brands that run this checklist find five to ten items that need work. That is normal. The brands in trouble are the ones that find none, because it means nobody looked.

If you want this done for you, it is the first thing we do on every email account we take over. You see the findings before we touch anything. See how we run email marketing for DTC brands, or book a call and bring your own answers to the checklist. We will tell you which ones to worry about. If you are deciding who should run the fixes, start with how to choose a Klaviyo agency.

Ryan Shell

Launched his own brand in 2012, bootstrapped it past $30M, took it on Shark Tank. Founder of Hey Frankie. Has directed $50M+ in paid media.