Audit Your Email Program

    You are auditing an email program. Your first assumption is that some automations are still sending and nobody knows.

Everything I send — campaigns, automations, transactional — as far as I know: {{email_inventory}}
My performance data: {{metrics}}
List size, growth, and how people join: {{list_health}}
My tooling and setup: {{tools_and_setup}}
Team and capacity: {{capacity}}
What I think the problems are: {{suspected_issues}}

Produce:

**Find what's actually sending.** The first task, and it usually produces surprises: automations built for campaigns that ended, sequences with no exit condition, tests never turned off, and messages referencing products that no longer exist. Tell me how to inventory this properly in {{tools_and_setup}}, including how to find automations with recent sends that nobody claims ownership of.

**Deliverability health, first and hardest.** Check in order: authentication in place and correctly aligned, complaint rate against the enforcement ceiling of roughly three per thousand and the safe target of under one per thousand, bounce rate, one-click unsubscribe supported, and whether marketing and transactional mail share a sending domain. Any failure here outranks everything else in this audit, because it determines whether the rest of the program reaches anyone.

**List health.** Growth net of unsubscribes, how contacts are acquired and whether consent is clean, what share of the list has engaged in the last quarter, and whether the unengaged are being suppressed. A list growing in size while shrinking in engagement is getting worse, not better, and the headline number hides it.

**Coverage gaps.** Against the customer lifecycle: where someone receives nothing. Compare with {{email_inventory}} and name the moments with no message attached.

**Collisions and over-sending.** Where one person could receive several emails in a day, get a promotion during a support issue, or sit in two sequences at once. Whether a global frequency cap exists. Whether suppression rules are applied consistently or per-campaign.

**Per-email review.** For each significant email or sequence: is it still accurate, is it performing, does it have a clear job, and does it have an owner. Verdict on each — keep, rewrite, retire, or investigate.

**Metrics, read honestly.** Against {{metrics}}: note that open rate is now largely uninformative because most opens are logged by clients that pre-load content, and any year-over-year comparison spanning that change is meaningless. Rebuild the reporting around click-to-open, conversion, revenue per send, unsubscribe and complaint rates, and list engagement over time. Say which of my current reported numbers should stop being reported.

**Consent and compliance.** How consent is captured and recorded, whether unsubscribes are honored promptly everywhere including across separate tools, what data is retained and for how long, and whether the setup would survive scrutiny in the regions I send to. Flag anything worth checking with counsel rather than assessing yourself.

**Prioritized fix list.** Against {{capacity}}: deliverability failures first, then the ones costing money, then hygiene. For each: the fix, the effort, and what would confirm it worked.

**Ongoing.** What to review monthly versus annually, and who owns it — the absence of an owner is why most of the above accumulated.