Welcome to your new favourite checklist before you send out your email campaign.

Whether you’ve used email as a marketing tool before or this is your first – it doesn’t matter. This list will come in handy whenever you feel like double-checking your campaign before you’re ready to press “SEND NOW”.

So let’s get to it:

Look before you leap

• Determine the goal(s) of the email campaign: lead generation, sales, education, etc. You’ll never know what you’re doing if you don’t know where you’re going!
• Define clear KPIs for your campaign. When it’s time to report, you’ll know where you need to tweak.
• Make sure your recipient list is up-to-date and only contains subscribers. #GDPRproof
• Use a naming convention for every asset in this campaign, so you can easily find them if you need to make changes to any of them.

Be as appealing as possible

• Use an active and inviting reply-to address. No-reply@example.com will not help your brand for two reasons. For one, a lot of email clients will recognize them in a jiffy and blow the spam whistle. And even if you get to the inbox, no one likes a Negative Nancy, right?
• Create a captivating subject line that will make your audience want to open your email.
• Test different subject lines to learn which one works best for your business, and is in line with your service. For example, if you’re selling pants, ask the contact “who’s wearing the pants in your household?”
• Optimize your preview text. You only have about 50 characters to convince your contact to read your message!

Functionality trumps design

• Make sure the design of your email is aligned with the style guidelines of your brand.
• Test your template design in different mail clients, on desktop as well as mobile, and never forget about every email developer’s nightmare: Outlook. Testing your design for Outlook might kill your spirits, but sending out a mail that looks weird might kill your marketing endeavors, so it’s worth it!
• Test your plain-text version as well. Even if your mail ends up in a spam folder, a well-designed plain text email can make the difference!
• Choose the placement of your Call-to-actions wisely. A perfectly placed button will increase your clicks significantly. Increased engagement means more winning(s), so think twice.
• Use alternative text for every image in your email. If a contact can’t see your image, at least he or she will have an idea what it’s about.

Insert content with caution

• Make sure all placeholder text is replaced with actual content. While lorem ipsum might be interesting to a Latin major, most people in your contact list will not care for Caesar’s words, nor will they even understand any of it.
• Don’t spread fake news: verify that your message is factual and accurate.
• Respect the placeholder images: use reliable tools to resize or crop your images to the exact format of the template. Different email clients may react rather unpredictably to deviating sizes. https://imageresize.org/ provides an easy to use tool for cropping and resizing images. Take a look!
• Have multiple colleagues read and re-read your content to check for grammar, style and spelling mistakes. Nothing is more embarrassing than sending out an email filled with typos.
• Always include company contact information in the footer with working links to both your website and your subscription center, as well as a physical mailing address. Who knows? Maybe you’ll get fan mail in your regular post!

Report in order to reap the benefits

• Using the KPIs set before you created your campaign, define the most important metrics you would like to analyze in your report.
• Set the period which you’d like reporting stats for. Make sure to leave enough time between sending out your campaign and reporting, so you don’t miss out on any data.
• If one of your goals isn’t met, find out what you can do to fix the issues and make changes to your strategy for future campaigns. Even a failed campaign is a great campaign, because it will teach you how to get better each time!
• Compare the results of this report to the previous one and assess whether you have improved or not, and why.

All of these “checks” might look like a lot of hassle and you may think about just doing it the easy way, because you have so much work to do and this campaign really needs to be sent out as quickly as possible. However, this checklist might help you obtain a more structured way of preparing campaigns, which will actually reduce your future workload! So good luck!