LS5
What do you check in your email campaign before sending?
Hey all! We all know "the fear" that one experiences before pressing send. To help alleviate that fear, we all go through our own QA process on our campaigns. Clicking links, doing a final spell check, double-checking your reply-to, and more are part of the QA process for every email send.
What else are you checking before every send? I'm talking nitty gritty stuff, like using sentence case for headlines and that the email file size is under a certain limit. I'd love to hear more about your checks!
I have a looooong list of items I check during my personal QA process before sending it to the team for testing (the "pre-QA" QA, if you will). Here's 10 of the items that I always triple-check and update in every email before testing, in no particular order:
1. Update any smart quotes with the code equivalent
2. Google Analytics code is correct
3. All images are uploaded to our ESP and updated with the hosted URL
4. All images have alt text that fits on one line
5. The preheader text is updated and is at least 96 characters long (I've found that 96 is the "sweet spot" to get the preheader to take up enough space in different email clients)
6. Email Analytics code is added to the email and activated
7. The footer is updated to match the content of the message, with links to unsubscribe and/or to our email preference center
8. "View online" link is working
9. All images are linked so that Gmail won't add that annoying download arrow to them
10. "Envelope" is correct (from, reply-to, subject line, etc.)
Our checklist is split out into five main categories:
These further breakdown. So, to check spelling and grammar we copy the entire email into word to see where any red lines may be appearing. For copy we check alt tags too.
We use a tool called Megapattern that catches any common coding errors (unencoded special characters, unprovided links, images without alt text, outdated tracking codes from before our ESP update, etc). We have marketers provide an approved proof, that basically means they're signing off on all the contents/links and taking responsibility for it if there are mistakes, and list approval, where they sign off on the list and list count.
We also hit reply and "check names" in Outlook on any email with variable senders (we've had issues with marketers providing misspelled email addresses)--variable sender emails are probably our most likely to have a mistake discovered on the launch round.
And, of course, we check all the links--even though we check the links every round, we've discovered new issues on the website while checking the links on the launch round before, and delayed the launch while those are fixed.
We have a fairly robust sign-off process, as I have to deal with emails in various different languages (and I don't speak any of them!), so there's a process in place to get various translators and experts to sign off email content before sending. But after that my last few checks include:
The right information in the "envelope" as all the senders are in the same account, I need to make sure I don't select the wrong sender for the wrong country.
Litmus analytics tracking code is in and activated.
All links are tracked.
The unsubscribe and view online link are in place.
Re-check all the links, make sure they're all going to the right place.
You can download our checklist here: http://www.whatcounts.com/resources/email-deployment-checklist-2/
Enjoy :)
We made some laminated pre-send check-lists that we can mark on with dry erase marker before every send, super helpful! Happy to mail you a few if you want some. On the list we included: *Email Renderings and Spam filters, Image Alternative Text, Variable Content / Merge Tag Previews, From Name, From Email, Subject Line, Pre-header/Preview text, Links (including header/footer/unsubscribe), Google Analytics Tracking on all links, Send Date/Time, Seed List (Both your own internal seed list, and Return Path seed list if available).
Hope that's helpful!
We generally use a preflight request form to make sure we're filling the necessary things to make our emails as responsive as possible. Depending what the campaign involves for assets, I have specific best practice guides and checklists I use to QA everything.
The basic things I check for ANY campaign are:
1. Using correct email template for campaign
Email includes privacy policy, contact info and unsubscribe link in footer
Counts for Subject Line and Preheader (30 characters for subject and about 85 for preheader). Also, making sure that preheader text exists…this is something I telling my team to include.
Spam Word Check (cross-referencing copy based on Spam Word List I made for my team, and making edits to get rid of spam words)
Correct To and From Names
Copy Flow- does it make sense, does it match the CTA and is basic spelling and grammar used?
CTA text copy, button and color (for better conversion and to pass color blindness text)
Correct hero image
Email links that need to be tracked have UTMs in place (according to team naming conventions)
Litmus Analytics code created, activated and placed in email
User journey as a whole- making sure the autoresponder email is sent to a lead and ESP captures the conversion properly. This one is a no-brainer, but has caused roadblocks for many of our campaigns, so I always quadruple check this!