What do you check before you send your marketing emails?

10 mistakes to prevent using an Email pre-flight checklist

In my 10 years plus in email marketing I have been involved in sending hundreds of e-mailings and reviewing just as many in my consulting and training courses. Does everybody make mistakes? Yes. Can you make less if you check and double check? Yes.

It is good practice to always have a checklist "to hand" when sending an email campaign. I'm guessing you have one, at least an informal one? If you don't have one or want to see how complete your checklist is, try my helpful PDF with a 51 point email marketing checklist.

To give you a flavour, let me give you some real life examples of impactful email marketing mistakes we avoided because we did a last minute check. Here are 10 of most worst email marketing mistakes we prevented just at the last moment...

• Very embarrassing spelling errors (don’t ask).
• Picture of the wrong account manager in a personal invitation
• Last minute price change was not copied to the email
• Wrong barcode inserted
• A part of the text described product benefits for a different product
• Landing pages only visible inhouse (not public)
• Loads and loads and loads of wrong or not working links
• Leaving programmers jokes, testing subject lines and text in the email
• Selecting last year’s email promotion instead of this year’s
• Sending to the exclusion group

The difference between an audit and a checklist

There is quite a difference in what you want to check on a day to day basis (each send) and when you are doing an in-depth review of your templates and program. Actually most experienced marketers know they need to do both, but don't get around to the periodic email marketing review, for several reasons. Using the checklist doesn't pardon you from that!

Using a pre-flight email marketing checklist

Now, most of these problems can be detected early on as long as you are focused on the email, not distracted while checking and double check. But you also need to know what to look for. Even the most senior email marketers make mistakes. In my experience a checklist can really save your skin from embarrassment. You can download the pre-flight email marketing checklist here.

.