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You know you should look at your email marketing. You’ve been meaning to for months, maybe even longer. Every now and then you open your email platform, stare at the list of automations and tags you set up at various points over the last few years, and quietly close the tab again.
You’re not alone in this. Reviewing your email marketing is one of those tasks that feels like it could take forever, partly because you’re not sure where to start and partly because you’re a little afraid of what you’ll find.
And honestly? It is a proper job. I’m not going to pretend you’ll knock it out in twenty minutes. But the reason it feels so big usually isn’t because it’s impossibly complicated. It’s because there’s no obvious starting point. You open your email platform, see everything at once, and your brain goes “nope.” What you need is a process, and this post gives you one.
However, I’m not going to teach you about spreadsheets full of metrics or running a deliverability diagnostic. That’s not what you need. What you want to do is take a proper look at what you’ve built, figuring out what still makes sense for your business right now, and being honest about what doesn’t.
We’ll go through it, step by step, as if we were on a call and I was walking you through the process.
Why your email marketing needs a review
Most email marketing gets built in bursts. You launch a freebie and set up an automation. You create a new offer and add some tags. You write a welcome sequence, tweak it six months later, then leave it alone for a year. Each piece made sense at the time.
The problem is that your business keeps moving, but your email marketing doesn’t move with it. Offers change, your voice slightly changes over time, or your freebies are outdated. However, that automation you created eighteen months ago is still the same as before.
There are really three ways your email marketing goes stale. The content becomes outdated: wrong prices, outdated product names, or links to pages that no longer exist. The technical side stops working properly: integrations break, tags that used to trigger the right automation now trigger nothing, or worse, the wrong thing. And sometimes the whole setup just outgrows you, or you outgrow it. What made sense when you had one freebie and a welcome sequence doesn’t make sense now that you have three offers, a quiz, and a handful of automations you’re not entirely sure are doing what you need them to.
None of this means you did anything wrong. It means your business grew and your email marketing didn’t get the memo.
You don’t need to turn this into a formal email marketing audit to get value from it. The good news is that once you can see what you’ve actually got, the decisions about what to keep, what to fix, and what to scrap become much simpler. The first step in reviewing your email marketing is simply taking stock of what you have.
Take stock of everything you have
Before you make any decisions about what to keep, fix, or delete, you need to know what’s actually there. This is the “open all the cupboards” step, and while it might be the part we tend to avoid at all costs, it’s also the most eye-opening part of the whole process for most people.
Go through your email platform and make a list of every automation you have. Every sequence. Every form. Every tag. Don’t judge anything yet, don’t start fixing things, just get it all down where you can see it.
It doesn’t need to be fancy. Personally I love having a spreadsheet where I lay it all out, name, and for automations and forms, the link. Adding all that to the spreadsheet can feel like a lot, but most of the time, just a simple select-and-copy/paste works.
(By the way, with the new Kit MCP tool you could ask Claude or another AI tool to create this spreadsheet for you. It won’t be able to list automations, but it can list tags, forms and sequences. That saves you so much time!)
The reason this step matters is that most people have far more running in the background than they realise. I once worked with a client who had over a hundred lead magnets and couldn’t even remember where half of them were. She’d made a new freebie for almost every YouTube video she put out because someone told her that’s what she should do. That’s an extreme example, but the pattern is common: things accumulate because each one made sense in the moment.
You’re not trying to create a perfect document here. You’re trying to get the full picture in one place so that for the first time, you can actually see what you’re working with. Once you have that, the next step is to figure out how it all connects.
Go through what you've got
Your forms and landing pages
For every form on your list, find out where it lives. Is it on a page that’s still active on your website? Is that page easy to find, or is it buried somewhere nobody visits anymore? Sometimes a form isn’t used on a website, but meant to connect an integration.
Does the form still deliver what it promises? If it offers a freebie you’ve since updated or retired, the form is doing a job that no longer exists.
Check what happens when someone fills it in. Does it trigger an automation? Add a tag? Start a sequence? Or does it just add someone to your list with no next step at all? A form without a clear path after it is a dead end for the person who just signed up.
You can also notice if no one is coming in through that form, which is really telling information too.
Your automations and sequences
For each automation, note what triggers it. Is it a form submission, a tag being added, a purchase, or an integration from another tool?
Then look at what happens inside it. What tags get added or removed? What sequences get called? Make sure you also note that in the other places. So if sequence A gets called in automation 1, you want to mention on sequence A’s line in the spreadsheet that it’s being used in automation 1.
This is usually where people have their biggest “oh” moment. You’ll find automations you forgot existed, sequences that reference an offer you stopped selling a year ago, or emails that still talk about something as “new” when it hasn’t been new for a long time. You might also find automations that technically work but send people somewhere you’d rather they didn’t go anymore.
Your tags
Tags tend to multiply faster than anything else. You’ll probably find duplicates, old naming conventions sitting alongside new ones, and tags you created for a one-off campaign two years ago that are still attached to hundreds of subscribers.
For each tag, check whether it’s used in any automation, sequence, or segment. If it’s not used anywhere and nobody is actively receiving it, it’s clutter. Make a note of it, but don’t delete or combine anything yet. That comes next, and there’s an important reason to wait.
Decide what to update, simplify, or remove
By now you should have a pretty clear picture of what’s working, what’s sitting idle, and what’s out of date. The next step is deciding what to do about it. Not everything needs the same action, and not everything needs action right now.
Most of what you find will fall into one of three categories.
Some things are working but need refreshing. The automation logic is fine, but the emails inside it mention an old offer or link to a page you’ve since changed. The form is in the right place and people are coming through it, but it delivers a freebie you’ve since improved. These don’t need rebuilding. They need updating.
Some things need simplifying. You’ve got four tags that essentially mean the same thing, or three forms that do the same job on different pages. This is where you tidy up and bring things together. But before you combine or rename any tags, check what automations they’re connected to first. Merging two tags can trigger an automation you’ve forgotten about, and suddenly hundreds of subscribers get an email they were never meant to receive. Map the connections before you merge anything.
By the way, I’ve written a blog about how to simplify your freebie setup that might be interesting to you if you’re on Kit.
And some things just need to go. Sequences that aren’t triggered by anything. Tags that nobody is receiving anymore and that aren’t used in any automation or segment. Forms on pages that no longer exist. These are safe to remove, and removing them makes everything else easier to manage because you’re no longer scrolling past things that aren’t doing anything.
(Again, this feels like a place where AI can help you. If in your full analysis your form isn’t mentioned as having a location, being used in an automation or anything, it could mark them for deletion. Just always do the final check yourself.)
If you’re not sure about something, leave it for now. You can always come back to it. The priority is fixing things that are actively causing problems: broken links, wrong offers, and outdated information in emails people are actually receiving. Tidying up comes after that.
Check your subscriber list health
Everything we’ve looked at so far has been about the system: the automations, the forms, the tags, the wiring behind the scenes. But your email marketing isn’t just plumbing. It’s people.
This is where you look at who’s actually on your list and whether they’re still engaged. Most email platforms will show you basic engagement data: who’s opening, who’s clicking, who hasn’t done either in months.
You’ll probably find that a chunk of your list is cold. That’s normal. People sign up, life gets busy, and they stop opening your emails. It doesn’t mean your content is bad. It means people’s inboxes are full and their attention has moved somewhere else.
What matters is knowing the split. If you have 2,000 subscribers and 400 of them haven’t opened anything in six months, that’s useful information. It affects your deliverability because email providers notice when a large percentage of your list ignores you, and it affects how you read your own numbers. An open rate of 30% on 2,000 subscribers looks different when you realise 400 of those people were never going to open it in the first place.
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Are you reviewing to improve or reviewing to move?
Whether you treat this as a quick tidy-up or a full email marketing audit depends on where you are and what you need. Everything in this blog post works whether you’re staying on your current platform or thinking about moving to a different one, but it’s worth pausing here to think about which one you’re doing, because it changes what you do with your findings.
If you’re staying, your goal is to fix and improve what you have. Update the sequences that reference old offers. Clean up the tags. Remove the forms that aren’t doing anything. You’re making your current setup work better for where your business is now.
If you’re thinking about moving to a new platform, the review you’ve just done becomes something slightly different. It becomes a packing list. Instead of asking “how do I fix this,” you’re asking “do I even want to take this with me?” A migration is a chance to start cleaner, and most people find they only need to bring across a fraction of what they’ve built. The automations that are still relevant, the tags that actually mean something, and the subscribers who are still engaged.
Either way, the review process is the same. You still need to know what you’ve got before you can decide what to do with it. The difference is just where you go from here.
What if you don't want to do this yourself?
Going through this process on your own is completely doable. But I also know that for some people, reading through this post has confirmed exactly what they suspected: they’d rather have someone else do it.
If you’re on Kit, this is something I do regularly. My Kit Account Audit is a full review of your account, covering everything we’ve talked about here: tags, segments, automations, forms, and sending habits. You get a Loom video walkthrough so you can see what I’m seeing, plus a written document with observations and prioritised recommendations for what to fix first. Think of it as a proper email marketing audit done by someone who knows Kit inside out. It’s designed to give you a clear, honest picture of where things stand so you know exactly what to focus on.
If you’re not on Kit, or you’re not sure what you need yet, you’re welcome to book a free connection call and we can talk it through.
Either way, the goal is the same: to stop guessing and start knowing what you’ve got.
Your email marketing grew with your business. Every automation you set up, every tag you created, every form you built was a response to something real that was happening at the time. The fact that it’s messy now doesn’t mean you got it wrong. It means things moved on.
Reviewing your email marketing isn’t about getting everything perfect. It’s about catching your email marketing up to where your business is today. You know more now than you did when you set most of this up. Trust that, and use it.
