The anxiety of sending an email, especially for marketers, is genuine. It might be difficult to strike a balance between high-quality content and a professional email structure. Unfortunately, even with seasoned people in the mix, email blunders can occur.
We’ve designed an email campaign preflight checklist that you can save, print, and use to reduce email errors (then repeat).
Before hitting “send,” our email team performs this checklist to ensure that our professional email format is perfect, typos are fixed, and a marketing strategy is in place. This email infographic can be used by your entire team for review as well as for dissecting your own communications.
With the email campaign preflight checklist, you can create an error-free, professional email format.
Instead of being afraid, send emails with confidence and wait for the results to come in.
Timing
Date and time of send: Select a date and time for your send and mark it in your calendar. Make sure it doesn’t conflict with any other sends, and if it does, suppress any lists that are affected.
The details
- Check for typos and customization in the subject line.
- Have you altered the preheader text? Make sure there are no mistakes.
- Have you adjusted the footer, if necessary?
- Always provide your company’s physical address as the sender address.
- Reminder about permissions: have you modified them as needed?
- You must always offer an unsubscribe link.
- Are the social icons connected to the relevant social networks?
- Are the images properly linked? Have you used ALT text to describe your image? Both procedures are necessary because they provide alternate ways to see the email in the event that it does not render properly.
- Do you have a fallback color for background images?
- Are your headlines well-connected?
- Is the connectivity between the CTA buttons correct? They must be linked to the appropriate landing pages in order for your viewers to take the necessary step to convert.
- Do you have a back-up plan for personalization?
- Who should view dynamic content? Gender, locality, and other list specifics can be used to define this.
Lists
- Do you have any lists that need to be suppressed?
- Are there any parts of your list that you need to leave out?
- Do you have all the fields you require in your subscriber list?
Testing
Have you sent yourself a test email in order to get an idea of what’s in your inbox? This is a crucial step in the preflight checklist since it will show you not only how the email opens, but also what changes you may need to make after viewing it on a computer or mobile device.
Have you run a full inbox test? What works well in one email client may not work well in another, so make sure you do a full inbox test to examine how your message appears in different email clients.
Is this advertising being A/B tested? This is critical for your email campaign to be successful. An A/B test allows you to send two different versions of the same email to small groups of your email list. Whichever one performs better should be sent to your entire mailing list.
Other
Notify appropriate teams, such as customer service or sales. Send them a link to the campaign, tell them who the target demographic is, and let them know when the campaign will go live.
Send
You can send your campaign right away or later. When you take the effort to do an A/B test before sending to everyone on your list, deciding on the best time becomes a lot easier.
Following that
View your campaign’s analytics to see how it fared. Analytics can show you who is reading your material, where they are coming from, and a lot more. These actionable insights aid in the improvement of a specific email campaign as well as your overall email marketing strategy.
Lastly
We all make mistakes, but we hope that this pre-flight email campaign checklist will help you send your emails with confidence.