When Murphy’s law meets Email Marketing there’s bound to be trouble…

Essential checks even the email professionals get wrong. What should your Email marketing broadcast checklist contain?

Does your email campaign check all the boxes? A possible mistake can be at best embarrassing, at worst a legal risk or an opportunity cost of missed revenues that could lose you your job. Although as marketers it is our task to get the most out of our communication, the test, test, test mantra only applies to split testing and sometimes Quality Assurance for email doesn't get the attention it should as we all battle common sense / best practices amnesia from time-to-time and Murphy's law must have been developed for email marketing, right?

You'll know that there was once a man named Murphy whose law simply reads:

'Everything that can go wrong, will.'

Similarly in email marketing, the more campaigns you run, the more mistakes are likely. But rather than just accepting you can manage these risks, in fact this risk reduction approach is where Murphy's Law originated. What you may not know is that Edward Murphy was involved in research around 1949 at Muroc Army Air Field (later renamed Edwards Air Force Base) for the purpose of testing the human tolerance for g-forces. In criticising an assistant on the test, he said: "If that guy has any way of making a mistake, he will". This blunt comment caused him to fall out with his team and he later justified it in that in his view.

"It's important to consider all the possibilities (possible things that could go wrong) before doing a test and act to counter them".

Anyone involved in managing email marketing hopefully has a similar approach - they will will have a simple email QA checklist either in their head or a shared approach for the company. To help improve the checklists and so hopefully reduce the scope for error, I've recently been updating the Smart Insights checklist for Expert members.

In this post I wanted to highlight a couple of these checks that are perhaps less obvious.

Email pre-send checklist

Here are 5 essential email marketing pre-send checks even the professionals get wrong.

• 1. Should we send this email at all?
  A basic question often not asked. As the wheels grind and newsletters go on autopilot, it is good to periodically be critical and ask a basic question like this. Yes, there are email broadcasts that were better not sent (and possibly a different one in its place).
• 2. Can subscribers act on it?
  A bit less drastic is the question: 'Should we send this email to this recipients?'– emphasising the need for selection of the right audience segments. No need to send an offer if someone can’t, won’t or will not be interested in its content. A marketer always includes a Call-to-Action, that means an action that they can act on.
• 3. Are we getting to know our audience?
  Another opportunity often missed is the chance to get more (profile) data. Offering an 'update your profile' link at the bottom is good, asking more information like in progressive profiling like Vodafone does in their email prospecting program is even better.

• 4. Are we going to learn anything?
  Once the email is out the door and the results come back in. Did we learn anything? I see this in two ways. Even in emails that are being split test, often the goal is a lift in results, but nothing learned. Doing some random tests on the subject line, without a strong Hypothesis. And worse - no way to incorporate the learnings in future emails. Opportunity missed.
• 5. Are we being - shoot myself in the foot - smart?
  Every C-level executive likes a good jargon overdose. Every marketer like a good high-open subject line and every writer likes a good pun. But it might be that the joke is on you in terms of conversion. Actually being vague, too general or misunderstood is a definite conversion killer. As Marc Brownlow explains in this article, while you want high open rates, you might be address the wrong audience.

Ready for lift off! Did we go through the prelaunch QA checklist? I can’t begin to count how many mistakes I did not make due to a solid checklist. It does take some time to go through it, but pays off every time you spot one of those very embarrassing ones.

If you fully outsource a part of your email marketing, probably the technical parts fall under the responsibility of the email agency and you don’t have to worry about that every time. Still, you need a checklist to review their approach, since they are also subject to Murphy's law