We all know how important email marketing is to businesses great and small but even if you are building email campaigns on a regular schedule, you may not be taking the necessary steps to ensure that they will perform as well as they can. You know the email marketing basics, but do you know what to do once the campaign is built? After you’ve built your campaign in your email service provider, be sure to run through this checklist step by step.
1. Check Every Link
This sounds so simple and obvious but I am always amazed at the number of campaigns I see in my inbox that have broken or missing links. The easiest way to check the links yourself is send yourself a test and starting at the bottom of the campaign and work your way upward, clicking each and every link. Leave every tab open that resulted from clicking a link. When you’re done, count the number of hyperlinks in your campaign and the number of open tabs – these should match. Any hyperlinks that are incorrect, just fix. Simple but a common mistake that I see almost every week.
2. Review on Your Smartphone
Now, I know what you’re going to say, “But, my email service provider has a preview and it’s faster to just check there.” Well, it’s been my experience that the preview option on most platforms is not 100% accurate. Most times what I see on my iPhone does not match the preview. So, because most websites are seeing 60% or more of their traffic coming from mobile, it’s best to take this extra step and just open your test on your phone and review.
3. Check Your Grammar
When you are reading the email you wrote, it’s easy to read the copy in the way you intended and not exactly how it is in the campaign. An easy way to check your grammar and ensure there are no typos is to run through a checker. We love using Grammarly for all of our copy. They even have extensions for most browsers to make it more versatile in your process.
4. Click Your Images
Most people now believe that images on websites and emails link to something. So, click on every image in your campaign test to make sure that they are hyperlinked to content.
5. Review Your Merge Tags
Did you add some personalization to your campaign? Be sure that you send a campaign to yourself to ensure that the merge tags are working properly. Sometimes test preview campaigns don’t show the merged data, so you can always send only yourself a campaign to double-check these settings. It’s important because if the merge tags are set up incorrectly, it can make your copy wrong or pull the wrong data into the wrong spot.
Time To Schedule
Now that you’ve run through the checklist to make sure that you didn’t miss any errors while you were building your campaign, you are ready to schedule. Be sure to pick the best time to send your email campaign, and schedule it for the correct audience list or segment. Once I schedule my campaign, always go back and check the setup one more time on the dashboard of my account to make sure it’s correct. Then, once your email campaign is sent, don’t forget to go into your account and check to make sure it was delivered correctly. Email marketing always requires the important follow-up step.
