When you send out a marketing email or email newsletter only to realize after hitting 'send' that you misspelled your company name or the email's main call-to-action doesn't have a link or contains a broken link, you know you're in big trouble.
The best way to avoid this embarrassment and the poor email marketing results that often accompany it is to create a checklist of items you need to review before sending a mass email. Here is a checklist you can refer to before hitting 'send' on your next marketing email campaign:
1. Spelling and Grammar
Grammar and punctuation are the most important factors when it comes to email marketing. A great email marketing campaign can easily be ruined by a few small syntactical or grammatical errors. This includes errors related to clarity, spelling, grammar usage, punctuation, and tone.
Send your test email to the biggest grammar geek on your team to check for any mistakes, but a faster alternative is to use a grammar tool. Our team uses Grammarly to catch any grammar and punctuation errors for all our email marketing content.
2. Broken and Forgotten Links
Lead generation is the ultimate goal of an email marketing campaign. That's why it's crucial to check to make sure all your links are active by clicking on every single link.
Does the right page load? Do you have a 404 error? Fix any broken links and double-check to ensure every anchor text, image, CTA, and social media sharing/follow icon that should be linked is indeed linked.
3. Correct Social Media Buttons
Before sending your email, you'll want to test the social media buttons just to be sure they work and lead to the correct destination. Send a test email to your email address and click those sharing buttons for extra confirmation.
4. Formatting
Review your email to ensure the formatting looks just the way you intended. Does your content stand out between each section and from the background? If you used bullets, check to make sure it's displaying correctly.
Some email clients can't display HTML bullets correctly, so use asterisks (*) instead of squared or rounded HTML bullets. Also, check the lines to make sure they aren't bleeding into each other and there's enough space between elements.
5. Clear Imagery
How do your images look? Are they pixelated, overwhelmingly large, squished, or stretched? And did you remember to associate alt text with them when they don't render? Check your images to confirm they're displaying correctly and if not, adjust accordingly.
6. Use Correct Branding Colors
The right colors can make your email stand out from the crowd. While the colors you use in your email campaigns don't have to match your brand exactly, they should reflect your overall branding color palette. The right choice of color improves brand recognition by up to 80%, so ensure you're using the correct branding colors to reinforce your brand identity.
7. Sender Name Using Correct Dynamic Tags
Which moniker are you using for your sender name? Is it the company name or the name of someone at your company? A HubSpot A/B test found that emails sent by a real person at the company were much more likely to be clicked on than those sent from the company name.
When using dynamic tags (a feature that allows you to personalize your email content by inserting the information you've already collected about your recipients into your email send), check if they're working correctly and pulling in the right information.
8. Subject Line and Preview Text
A good subject line and preview text can significantly improve your open rates. They are the first things your recipient will see before deciding to open your email, so check to make sure they don't get cut off. Keep them as brief as possible, 50 characters or less for the subject line and 40-130 characters for the preview text. You want to ensure that you optimize the preview text and display as much as you can in the email pane, especially on mobile devices.
Wrap Up
Email marketing can be tedious and time-consuming, so let us be your email marketing strategy experts. The De Novo Digital team can help your business create compelling emails that convert. Contact us today for your free consultation.