Email marketing is a very powerful tool for promoting your business, engaging with customers and driving more sales.
Having a comprehensive email checklist to run through before hitting that send button is essential in ensuring that the email campaign itself is designed for maximum success, free of mistakes and as effective as possible.
SmartMail has been working with clients of all sizes and across industries to ensure their email marketing campaigns are professional and successful in every way. Drawing from our expert experience, we’ve put together this email checklist for you to run through and check before sending out your next email blast.
The Email Marketing Checklist
1. Define the Goal and Audience
Technically, this first item on the checklist should be considered from the very outset. The design, graphics, content, layout and Call to Action of a marketing email should all reflect and be guided by the goal of the campaign and the target audience you’re looking to reach.
However, when the email is ‘ready to go’, it can be critical to give it the ‘once over’ again to ensure that the end result is reflective of the original goal and target audience. Think about who you are trying to reach and why? What do you want them to do and have you made that goal front and center?
2. Check the Subject Line
A lot of effort, and rightfully so, goes into the body and content of an email. However, ensuring you have an effective and compelling subject line should definitely be part of your email checklist.
The subject line is going to be your first and sometimes only attempt at influencing your reader. Without a punchy, to-the-point and enticing subject line, your target audience may not even engage with, open or read the actual email.
Once you have completed the marketing email itself, go back and reconsider the subject line in the context of the entire email. Does it get to the point in an enticing way? Is it reflective of what value the email/discount/offer/update/promotion is providing your target audience?
3. Make it Personal
After years in the business of email marketing, our specialists here at SmartMail know just how critical personalisng an email can be. Customers and clients like to receive emails that not just catered for their interests and needs, but even include their name and reflect the fact that they are being personally addressed.
Fortunately, there are many marketing email tools and programs that allow you to both personalize your email automatically, populating the email with information from your list of contacts and even segment your list into different groups to ensure that the right group of people get the right email.
Part of any good email marketing checklist is to run through both how you have effectively personalized the email itself and double check that you have segmented or directed the right email to the right target audience.
4. Do the Visuals Work
The design of your actual email is a crucial component of the entire marketing campaign. Without grabbing your customer’s interest and maintaining their attention they are likely to lose interest and click away or–worse-delete!
Here are some easy tips and best practices to follow:
- Only use high quality images.
- Prioritize easy-to-read fonts.
- Make the color scheme consistent.
- Use bold colors and imagery.
- Don’t allow the design or content to become cluttered or overwhelming.
Maintaining a polished and professional look in your email marketing campaigns is very important for the brand reputation of your company, so have a look at the end result with fresh eyes before you press the send button.
5. Check the Call to Action
Every marketing email–in fact, every piece of marketing full stop–should have a simple, easy-to-follow and effective Call to Action (CTA). This is where the rubber meets the road in your marketing.
The CTA is the specific action you want your target audience to do after reading your email. It might be to subscribe for further updates, purchase a product, or contact your sales team.
As part of your email marketing checklist, you should be reconsidering the CTA to ensure that it is prominent, easy to find and easy to follow. If you are including a hyperlink to an ecommerce page or website landing page, make sure that the link works and isn’t broken.
The most effectively created marketing emails will become completely undone by a CTA that does not work or fails to convert.
6. Proofread
You might think that this item on the checklist is too obvious to include, but it isn’t! Before sending out your email, despite your restlessness in getting it out there finally, make sure to proofread for errors in grammar, spelling, punctuation and details.
Small errors can look unprofessional and cause hard-to-quantify damage to your brand and company. Larger errors can even derail the success of the campaign and turn potential customers off of your offer.
It is best practice to have a third party proof your email campaigns to ensure fresh eyes are looking over the content. When you sign up with SmartMail we’ll take care of all of that for you so you can rest assured your emails are going out error-free.
7. Review the Email List
Once the email is ready to go, you’re almost there! Checking your email list will save you from sending out a marketing campaign to the wrong audience, to out-of-date addresses or invalid emails. Siphon out any duplicates to prevent customers from receiving the same email twice.
Apart from improving the efficacy of the campaign itself, this can also be an instrumental step in preventing your email from bouncing (i.e., not being delivered) or ending up marked as spam and thrown into the oft-ignored junk folder.
8. Test and Measure
The last item on our email QA checklist (that stands for quality assurance) is to send out a test email. This gives you peace of mind that everything looks and functions as it should. Sending a test email to yourself allows you to view all of the links, imagery and content as if you were a member of your target audience.
You can also use this opportunity to check and monitor your email metric measurements. Keeping track of your email’s success will both inform you of how well it is performing and provide invaluable data and information for better improving future campaigns and making other marketing decisions. If the concept of setting up or monitoring email metrics scare you, don’t worry! SmartMail can do it all–and then some–for you, so you don’t have to.
Would you like a free marketing email audit? Contact us today.
By working through our email marketing checklist you can have the confidence you need that your email is well-designed, error-free and optimized for maximum effectiveness.
Of course, you could always turn to the team here at SmartMail for all your email marketing needs to free you up to concentrate on what you really are good at: running your business.
