Send your email marketing campaigns confidently with our step-by-step guide.
Have you ever clicked ‘send’ on an email marketing campaign, only to realise an inconspicuous typo, or that you hadn’t linked your primary call-to-action? Sending marketing emails can be a nail-biting experience. You feel like you’ve proofed and proofed and proofed again, but sometimes teeny mistakes (or even big ones), can sneak through your checks.
So, to help ease the nerves, and avoid both common and lesser-known pitfalls, we’ve compiled the ultimate Transpond pre-flight email campaign checklist.
We have left no stone unturned. Covering everything from pre-header text to links, images to results, so be sure to bookmark this page for future reference and read on to ensure every email you send goes without a glitch.
Step 1: The Foundations
Before you think about trying to design or write copy for your email campaigns, you need to consider the basics. The devil is in the detail, and all these elements are cheeky culprits that catch even the best of us out, so don’t get complacent, consider them every single time.
- Have you established your email marketing goals for the campaign? Are you trying to make sales of a particular product? Are you trying to inform your audience of a new service? Or do you want your reader to sign up for an event? Once you have defined the purpose of your email, you can focus on developing a design, and copy, that prompts the action you want.
- Next, you want to ensure you’re using a template that is not only eye-catching and well-designed, but is complete with all the required information including an unsubscribe link, organisational contact information, social media icons and any terms and conditions. Once they’re all there (and correct), you can think about your recipients.
- Your send list is key to the success of your campaign. Who is the right audience for your message? Are there people you don’t want to receive this email? Segmenting your list will ensure your campaign is sent to an audience of engaged subscribers. It will improve your conversion rates, keep your readers engaged and boost your analytics. It’s also wise to clean your email marketing list regularly.
- Subject lines are the first thing your recipients will see and determine whether they want to open it or not, so make sure this isn’t an afterthought. Are there any typos? Is it succinct? Does it relate to your email goals? Do you want to test it?
- Along with your subject line is your pre-header text. Make sure it’s not the default ‘insert pre-header text here’ or something worse. Again, double check it for typos.
Step 2: The Build
This is the big one. The part that most marketers will spend much of their time, and where they hope their recipients will too.
Be sure to check every item off this list before a send, as it’s where the stakes are at their highest.
- It’s wise to ask someone else to proofread your email body copy. Is it written to encourage conversions, or to entice people to act? Are there any mysterious typos lurking in its depths? Make sure the messaging in your email aligns with your objectives and the expectations set in your subject line.
- Have you added in any appropriate personalisation or merge tags? Is it pulling from the correct field in your recipient list? (There’s nothing worse than receiving an email with “Hey Janet!” as an opener, when your name is in fact Mike).
- Calls to Action. Ok, so this is vital. Have you used actionable language? Are your buttons/links clear (make sure your links are not white on a white background, FAIL!) and do they ALL link through to the correct landing page?
- Design can make or break a campaign. Is your email well formatted, with appropriate white space and displaying correctly on different screen sizes/devices? It’s wise to send the email to yourself and your colleagues, so you can see it in ‘real life’ to make sure you’re happy.
- Check your images – are they all hosted on the internet and not on your local machine? Broken image links are the worst, especially if the image is key to your messaging. Oh! And check they’re all linking through to your landing pages too (that’s really easy with our link checker).
Step 3: The Evaluation
- There are soooo many different ways people can view emails nowadays, so be sure to run an inbox and spam test before you click send.
- Are you A/B testing your campaign? Don’t forget you might need to monitor two versions of your send.
- Tell your team! Make sure everyone knows what emails are going out so they can be prepared to answer questions, take calls, or align your messaging on your social channels too.
Step 4: The Send.
*Play dramatic, suspense filled music here*
This is the moment you schedule your send.
Give some thought to the timing of the campaign, as it can have a significant impact on your open rates. Research tells us that the best time of week to send an email is on a Tuesday or a Wednesday, and the worst is at the weekend, but there are several factors that can impact your list, so do your research and keep track of your results to learn what works best.
It’s sensible to refer to any automations and previous sends to ensure you’re not bombarding your lists with multiple emails daily. That gets tedious real fast, and ultimately leads to unsubscribes. Yuck.
Step 5: The Analysis
Just as important as sending a well written, properly proofed, and technically accurate email, is checking it’s results and monitoring your sends over time.
Your offering, messaging and recipients are all unique, so keeping track of what works best for you will continuously inform and improve your sends.
Have you had any hilarious email fails? If so, maybe it’s time to try Transpond.