It can be extremely nerve-wracking to click the send button after creating an email campaign. If you’ve ever been faced with such a task, you’ll probably remember the feeling of worry that you’ve forgotten something, or didn’t spellcheck thoroughly enough. At the best of times, it can be tricky to balance great quality content with an eye-catching format.
As a result, sometimes mistakes happen in email campaigns, no matter how much experience you have. To reduce the likelihood of errors happening, we’ve compiled an email campaign checklist you can use whenever you’re launching an email campaign. By doing so, you’ll be ensuring your marketing plan has been adhered to, your layout looks fantastic and there are no errors.
Timing
Think about whether the timing of your campaign is the best for your target audience. It might seem like a good idea to send emails in the middle of the day or just after work, but many target audiences respond to different times and a bit of research will tell you exactly what the best time is. It’s a great idea to add your proposed send dates and times to your calendar so you can check that they don’t clash with any of your other sends, as well as with things like religious holidays or anniversaries of disasters etc., as this can be deemed disrespectful (unless the religious holiday is one where marketing is seen as acceptable).
The Format
Subject line – is this personalised? A subject line should be catchy and stand out. Also, ensure you’ve double checked for typos or mistakes.
Pre-header text – check for mistakes and ensure it’s updated since last campaign.
Footer – ensure there’s nothing here that needs changing.
Your address – it’s important to include a valid business address.
Permission reminder – check that this is included and up to date.
Unsubscribe link – this is essential to avoid being marked as spam.
Social links – are these all pointing to the correct addresses?
The Content
Body – ensure the body text is relevant to the email topic, is short and sweet and has no typos, spelling or grammatical errors. It’s always a good idea to parse this text through a word program or spell check program.
Headlines – are all your headlines properly linked and added to the email preview (if desired)?
Images – have you added the appropriate ALT text and ensured they are properly linked?
Background – does this allow the rest of the content to be easily viewed? Ensure you add a fallback colour too.
Call to action – are your CTA buttons linked properly?
Personalisation – ensure your content makes sense when personalised and that you have appropriate fallbacks if it doesn’t work for some customers.
Dynamic content – who should see what. Is this aligned to the correct audiences?
Lists
Data – are all of the fields you need included in your subscriber list?
Suppressions – do you intend to suppress any lists?
Exclusions – are there any portions of your list you need to exclude?
Testing
Inbox preview – ensure you send all test emails to ensure they look good.
Full testing – check your emails are compatible with all email servers.
A/B Testing – are you A/B testing and if so, have you set this up?
Other
If you have teams such as sales, support or social media teams to notify, ensure they are aware of the email’s content so they can deal with any questions that come through. It’s a good idea to add these teams to your email subscriber group as a list so they always have the most current emails.
Send
At this point, you should be fine to send your campaign, but it’s still a good idea to schedule it for at least half an hour into the future if possible, in case there’s anything you suddenly remember you have to add.
Analyse
Keep an eye on those stats and check the performance of any A/B testing to see how well you did.
If You Make A Mistake
Don’t panic! Some of the world’s largest corporations have made mistakes with their email campaigns in the past. In fact, some have made multiple mistakes. It’s a great idea to have an email template specifically for when mistakes occur so you can quickly email out a correction, apology or retraction. Being honest and using appropriate humour seems to work well for apology emails, so put some thought into your templates and you’ll be fine.
You can now send all your email campaigns with confidence knowing that you’ve done everything you possibly can to prevent mistakes. If you do end up making a mistake though, it’s ok – we’re all human and these things happen, so your readers will understand.
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