Even the smallest mistakes in your marketing emails can ruin an entire campaign.
There’s nothing worse than the feeling of hitting “send” and then realizing that you sent the wrong link to your entire contact list.
It happens more often than you might think.
About 33 percent of marketers send weekly emails, and 26 percent send emails multiple times per month. That’s a lot of chances for mistakes. And those mistakes can embarrass your brand, affect the email recipient’s perception of your company and prevent your email from achieving its goal.
An email checklist can help. Email marketing mistakes are easy to avoid when you know what to look for.
The following are eight things to check before sending your marketing email. This checklist can help ensure no mistakes get past you.
Send a test email to yourself
In general, you always want to send a test email to yourself and open it on multiple devices. This way, you can go over all the email content as it appears in an email client interface before your email subscribers do.
This gives you the best opportunity to see how everything looks and test all aspects of your email.
Confirm that you’re sending to the right contact list
It’s important to confirm that your email is going to the correct inboxes. Of course, your email has to start with a clear goal in mind. That goal will direct the right messaging for the right people.
If you’re sending to the same message to all your contacts, it’s time to segment your contact list and personalize your messaging.
Remember that your customers and leads are all at different stages of your sales funnel. You wouldn’t send the same type of message to a past customer that you would a new lead, for example.
Check for broken and forgotten links
One of the biggest mistakes that can be made is to send out a marketing email with a broken or forgotten link. A broken link is when the link either doesn’t work or is incorrect in another way. A forgotten link is when the link is missing entirely.
Forgotten links are common on clickable images, social media buttons and call-to-action buttons.
Manually check every single link before you send your email to your target audience.
Confirm your personalized greeting
Personalization is powerful in email marketing. The ability to address a mass marketing email with a recipient’s first name can improve your open rate and potentially your conversion rate.
However, if a customer gets an email that says, “Hi {first name},” and not his or her actual first name, it looks unprofessional. And they likely won’t continue reading.
Double check all dynamic tags in your email to confirm that your personalization works. This is a must for your email checklist.
Check your grammar and spelling
This is typically the testing commonly thought about, confirming that your email has good grammar and spelling. This is because no matter what your content, if it has grammar or spelling errors, then your business will appear unprofessional and lose respect.
It’s all about proofreading. Sending a test version of your email to others on your team can help get additional eyes on your copy.
Tools also can help. A free spell checker can catch any spelling errors, but keep an eye out for homophones, words that sound the same but have different spellings and meanings. For example: flower and flour, or deer and dear. These can potentially slip through spell checkers. Grammar checkers, such as Grammarly and GrammarCheck can help identify poor grammar in your copy as well.
Deliver clear value (and CTA)
It’s important to confirm that every email you send has a point and offers clear value to the recipient. Otherwise, you risk your subscribers opting out from receiving your emails entirely.
This goes beyond the spelling and grammar checks. What are you offering? It could be a tip, a discount code, a link to a helpful article or guide or something else (as long as you don’t sound spammy).
The value should be aligned with your email marketing goal and larger goals for your business.
Of course, this value is capped off with a strong call-to-action. What do you want your recipients to do? Keep it simple, direct and compelling.
Optimize your subject lines and preview text
No matter how good your email content is, it doesn’t matter if your recipients never open your email to begin with. Your email checklist should include subject lines and preview text.
Your open rate largely comes down to your subject line. How are you catching your recipient’s attention and compelling him or her to open your email?
Subject lines need to be strong and sound conversational. You don’t want to sound overly sales-focused or robotic. It’s about creating excitement.
Also, keep the length of your subject line as brief as possible. Recipients should be inspired to find out more.
In addition to subject lines, the preview text can assist in compelling recipients to open your email. Preview text is a short snippet from your email text that displays in the inbox next to your email’s subject line.
Of course, you don’t have to let it default to the first 140 characters or so from your email copy. The preview text copy can be customized to display a message that supports your subject line in achieving a higher open rate.
Check your images and design
Blurry images or bad formatting can ruin your email. So, it’s not all about checking your written content. You also want to confirm that all visual aspects of your email work and work together.
Keep an eye out for pixelated or squashd images, and make sure that all images have associated alt text and display how you want them to. (Alt text will help if your images don’t render properly.)
In addition, you’ll want to consider:
- Formatting, such as bulleted list appearance and whether there’s too much or not enough white space
- Colors since background colors might not render for all recipients (so white text on a dark background might be illegible for some recipients)
In conclusion
Every email matters. It’s important to confirm every aspect of your marketing email before sending to ensure success. The cost of mistakes is too great. Set up your own email checklist so that you can stay on top of your email marketing and ensure that everything you send is as professional and effective as possible.
Check out our 16 email marketing best practices than can make a positive impact for your business.
