Digital marketing teams must have an email campaign checklist to ensure that everything looks perfect before sending emails. Here’s an email marketing checklist your team should follow to avoid errors:
Develop an Email Sign-Off Process
Anyone who receives sales and marketing emails from major brands and organizations should understand that there are several people the email must go through for approval. This is because the company that sends the email wants to be completely sure that it contains exactly the message they intend to send.
Good marketers know they need a campaign process flow chart that includes all of the most important players in the organization, such as:
- Anyone specifically mentioned in the email
- Every department that has a connection to the email
- HR and legal departments
There may be others that need to be included as well. While running an email through several departments like this slows down the process of sending out marketing emails, it’s helpful to catch mistakes before they go out to the public. It’s much easier to take the time to catch the mistakes rather than clean them up after they’re in people’s inboxes.
Integrate Email Automation
A central tenet of an email campaign checklist should be to make sure the email goes to all the right members of your email list. A response rate won’t meet your goals if the email doesn’t reach the inboxes of your target audience.
Email automation is key to increased engagement because it allows you to hit the right message to the right recipients at the right time. This increases the chances of upsell opportunities and converting leads into long-term customers.
Without integrating email marketing automation into your checklist, you risk dropping the ball on business opportunities that bring your company significant revenue. Before sending the email, make sure it’s curated for a specific list of recipients to ensure you get the most out of your email marketing efforts.
Check for Errors in Email Content
Spelling and grammar are important in a marketing email for obvious reasons, but there are other elements of the email that must be perfect as well. For example, are the products mentioned in your email currently available for purchase? If not, then when will they be? It’s important to keep your audience informed with valuable content throughout the email.
Before distributing an email, have a team member answer the following questions:
- Is there a subject line?
- Do all of the images show up as intended?
- Are all of the links in the email active and working?
- Does the email sound personalized to the recipient?
- Is there a working unsubscribe link?
While these may seem like small things, they’re important to the success of the email. If an individual opens an email with images that don’t appear or links that don’t work, then they’ll probably just delete the email and view it as spam. This would result in a wasted opportunity and a lead that will no longer be available to you.
Determine the Purpose of the Email
Imagine this—you have your finger on the send button and you’re excited about seeing how the public responds to your message, but then this question pops into your head:
Does this email provide value to the reader?
A thought like this will stop you in your tracks. It’s so easy to get caught up in the metrics of a particular email campaign that we often forget to think about the human aspect of it. There are real people who are going to read the messages you send, and they don’t want to spend all of their time clearing out their inboxes just because you feel like sending them something new. If the information you’re providing them doesn’t add real value to their lives, then you may have put them off from reading your messages ever again.
The key rule to add to your email marketing checklist is that you should always have an obvious purpose for any message you send. If you find yourself trying to justify sending an email, then reconsider sending it. Marketing messages should be obvious in terms of why they’re needed. If they aren’t, then you’re probably just trying to find a reason to send something out to stay relevant.
Email marketing is challenging and best practices for how to do it are constantly in flux. At Sapper Consulting, we provide clients with the latest insights and strategies for successfully reaching customers. If you want all of the latest information about how to successfully send marketing emails, contact us today.
