We’ve said a few times now, how much we appreciate the warm reception to the Ask Andy series. We (and especially I) can’t get enough of your kind words. It’s even nicer to get positive feedback from the people we’ve forged relationships with in the email marketing industry. I’ve looked up to many of them since I started at Benchmark Email, and their approval means a lot. One of those people, Jordie van Rijn, had nice things to say, but also pointed out one glaring error.

Jordie was quick to praise the graphics in our first Ask Andy video, but he also brought one big mistake to our attention. While discussing tracking, we showed a graphic of a report. The report showed a bounce rate of 28.2% and a Click Rate of 0%. Not the successful numbers we want for our users or any other email marketers.

Our design department works tirelessly on the Ask Andy videos and all other graphics they create for Benchmark Email. They do a phenomenal job. They grabbed the first screenshot they had of a report and threw it in there. The image is on screen for mere seconds.

Well, your viewers are more preceptive than you think they are. Jordie quickly illustrated this fact. Clearly, those aren’t the numbers you want to drive home with your audience. In fact the screenshot used was on file because it’s used in training to point out bad campaigns.

However, that’s not an excuse. It’s important to have some sort of quality control in place to avoid things like that happening to your company. It wasn’t design’s fault. I’m the one who’s supposed to be the email marketing expert. Nobody is perfect and mistakes will happen. To avoid them, it’s a good idea to create a checklist. That way it’s harder for those mistakes to occur. In fact, Jordie has a great email marketing checklist that you should check out.

I want to thank Jordie for not putting us on blast and also for being a great resource of information on email marketing. Speaking of which, here are the first two Ask Andy videos, in case you haven’t checked them out yet.