Even the most experienced email marketers can neglect to include the basics of proper email marketing best practices, nullifying the effectiveness of their campaigns. Here is a basic checklist to ensure that your email campaigns are covering all the bases.

Landing & Branding

  • Does your email message enhance the values integral to your brand?
  • Have you ensured that the implementation of your brand identity and logos is essentially identical to that used on your website?
  • Once the customer reaches your website through the links, is the landing page fully and exclusively dedicated to that particular campaign? Does it contain a convincing call to action?

Content

  • Are there any terms that could even remotely be defined as spam words anywhere in your subject line and body text?
  • Are you writing to an eighth grade education level?
  • Does your email message contain an offer that is easy to locate, easy to understand and compelling?
  • Have you struck a balance between the number of links and the amount of content, ensuring that neither overwhelms the other?
  • Is the structure of your email message focused, balanced and apropos?
  • Is your call to action persuasive as well as being conveyed both clearly and powerfully?
  • Is your subject line informative and alluring, but well under 55 characters in length?
  • Did you remember to include a link to your own brand’s social media fan page?

Social Media

  • Did you remember to include a link to your own brand’s social media fan page?
  • Does your email include share buttons that allow your readers to post it on popular social networks like Facebook and Twitter?
  • Have you included a link that can be forwarded to a friend and set it with a clear sign up link?

Personalization & Friendliness

  • Is the email being sent from a specifically proprietary branded domain?
  • Is the From Name prior to the @ symbol a friendly and comprehensible term such as Sally, Fred, Info, or Customer Service? Example: Sally@YourCompany.com
  • Over-personalizing your email messages is taboo, so have you implemented what you feel is the correctly balanced and restrained amount of personalization… or do you have the customer’s first name mail-merged six times in each paragraph?

Contact Management

  • Have you collected as many contact details as you feel your customers are comfortable in providing to you?
  • Is your sign up process as easy as it can possibly be? Are there any bottlenecks or any of the dreaded dead links in the process? Have you personally tested it?
  • Legal Requirements
  • Does your email message include all of your corporate details, including full company name and main office address?
  • Is your unsubscribing process completely simple, basic, straightforward, crystal clear, easy to understand and even easier to accomplish?

Technical Design

  • Are you absolutely certain that your code does not use any cascading style sheets (CSS)?
  • Do all your images have comprehensive alt text so that the content is still available if the customer has images turned off?
  • Is your email message quick to load even on slow connections and older computers, or is it weighed down with huge multimedia content?

Renderability

  • Have you checked the rendering of the email message on a variety of PC monitor resolution settings all the way up to 2560 x 1920 pixels? How about the wide variety of small resolutions used by smartphones, iPhones and the like?
  • Have you checked the rendering of the email message on a wide variety of the most popular email clients and web browsers?
  • Have you included a link to a web version of the email message itself?
  • If you have all these boxes checked off, you can now rest assured that your email campaign is on the launching pad!