Email Marketing
The Email Lifecycle Audit Checklist
A practical checklist to audit your email automations: welcome, abandoned cart, browse abandonment, post-purchase, and win-back, and find where revenue is leaking from your list.
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A practical checklist to audit your email automations: welcome, abandoned cart, browse abandonment, post-purchase, and win-back, and find where revenue is leaking from your list.
Most ecommerce businesses have a welcome email. Far fewer have a complete lifecycle program built around it. The gap between those two things is usually worth real, measurable revenue, because email consistently produces one of the highest returns of any marketing channel, but only when the automations behind it are actually built and actually maintained rather than set up once and forgotten.
This is a straightforward self-check. Go through each automation below, mark honestly whether it exists and whether it's actually performing, and you'll come out the other side with a clear, prioritized list of what to fix first.
Check whether it exists at all, and if it does, whether it sends immediately after signup rather than hours or days later when the moment of interest has already faded. Confirm it includes at least three emails rather than a single message, and that it includes a clear offer or next step rather than just a generic thank you for signing up. Pull its open rate from the last 90 days if you haven't looked recently.
Healthy welcome sequences typically see meaningfully higher open rates than regular broadcast emails, because the subscriber just took an action that signals genuine active interest. If your welcome sequence's open rate is close to your regular broadcast average, something in the sequence isn't landing the way it should. What broken looks like here is a single generic email, or a sequence that was built once during initial setup and never revisited as the brand, offers, or products changed around it.
Check whether it exists, and whether the first email sends within an hour of abandonment rather than the next day, by which point the intent has often cooled. Confirm there are at least two to three emails in the sequence spaced over 24 to 72 hours, not a single reminder. At least one email in the sequence should address a likely objection directly, shipping cost, sizing uncertainty, return policy, rather than simply repeating that something was left in the cart. Confirm the email actually shows the real product image and price, not a generic template reminder.
What broken looks like here is a single reminder email with no follow-up sequence behind it, or a sequence that was launched once and hasn't been monitored or updated since.
Check whether this exists at all. This is the single most commonly missing sequence in an email audit, triggered by product views without an add-to-cart action, distinct from cart abandonment. Confirm it's genuinely separated from your cart abandonment flow with different messaging suited to lower intent, and that it shows the specific product that was actually viewed rather than a generic catalog link.
What broken looks like here is simply not existing, which is the case for the majority of ecommerce email programs we audit, even ones with a solid cart abandonment flow already in place.
Check whether anything exists beyond a basic transactional order confirmation. A real post-purchase sequence includes care instructions or usage tips relevant to what was actually bought, introduces complementary products at an appropriate moment rather than immediately after purchase, and asks for a review at a point in the customer's experience with the product that makes sense, not the day it ships.
What broken looks like here is nothing beyond the transactional receipt, which is a missed opportunity to turn a first-time buyer into a repeat one during the window when they're most engaged with what they just bought.
Check whether it exists, and whether it's triggered by a specific inactivity window that's actually relevant to your typical purchase cycle, 60, 90, or 120 days depending on how often customers realistically buy from you. A good win-back sequence tries more than one approach across its emails, a simple check-in first, then an incentive, rather than jumping straight to a discount as the opening move. There should be a clear removal or suppression step at the end for people who don't re-engage, which protects your sender reputation for the rest of the active list.
What broken looks like here is no win-back flow at all, meaning lapsed customers simply keep receiving the same broadcasts as your most active subscribers, or receive nothing and are quietly lost without any attempt to bring them back.
Check whether you've reviewed your sender reputation and domain authentication, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, in the last six months. Confirm whether you're segmenting sends by engagement level, or sending every broadcast to your entire list regardless of how active any given subscriber actually is. Check whether you've removed or suppressed consistently unengaged subscribers within the last year.
What broken looks like here is sending everything to everyone, which quietly damages deliverability for your most engaged subscribers over time as inbox providers start treating your domain with more suspicion.
If you checked fewer than half the boxes across these five sequences, there is very likely meaningful revenue currently going uncaptured in your email program. Most businesses in that position see a measurable lift simply from building out the missing flows, well before any deeper optimization of the sequences that already exist.
Welcome and abandoned cart, in that order, because they capture the two highest-intent moments in the customer journey and typically produce a return fast enough to justify building the rest of the lifecycle program afterward. Browse abandonment and post-purchase nurture are strong next steps once those two are solid.
This varies significantly by business and list size, but automated flows commonly account for a meaningful share of total email-attributed revenue once fully built out, often disproportionate to how little ongoing effort they require compared to writing new broadcast campaigns every week.
The underlying logic applies broadly, but the specific sequences shift. A B2B business typically needs a welcome or onboarding sequence and a re-engagement sequence similar to win-back, but cart and browse abandonment are ecommerce-specific concepts tied to a shopping cart rather than a B2B sales cycle.
For more on the specific mechanics behind these sequences, read what drip marketing actually is and the three sequences to build first, and how send timing affects performance once the flows themselves are solid. If building and maintaining this isn't the best use of your time, our email marketing team runs exactly this audit as the starting point for every new engagement, beginning with a free Growth Gap Analysis.
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