Rushed. Hurried. Frenetic.

Those three words describe the state of the modern marketing manager, who is overloaded with responsibilities and deadlines. It’s a common state resulting from executives who expect results and over-promise expectations, without realizing the amount of detail and planning that goes into marketing.

What you’re then left with is a hyperactive marketing team that is prone to making mistakes. Some of those mistakes can be caught and corrected – while others not so much. I always say the worst mistake is the one people have seen. This is why before you click publish, you should always take the extra time to double check. However, double checking something like print copy or a blog post or artwork is one thing. In that scenario, you’re less likely to have made multiple errors. Where multiple errors or increased likelihood of mistakes are prone to happen is with the email campaign.

There are so many parts to an email campaign that anyone hurried cannot possibly invest the due diligence to make sure everything is good to go. This is why having marketing cheat sheets help, including this list of what to check off before clicking “send.”

1. Subject line. A common mistake people make is confusing the subject line with the email identifier that’s used for internal purposes. When sending out a test email, make sure you’re paying attention to what the subject line looks like to a reader.
2. Header Teaser. Some email platforms have a teaser tagline at the top of the email that’s different from the subject line. This is really easy to miss because it’s literally the smallest detail next to the email footer.
3. Links. Did you hyperlink anything and if so does it lead to the right page? Hyperlinks should also be set up to open up in a new tab so they’re not leading away from your email campaign.
4. Images. First off, check out the size and resolution to make sure images aren’t conflicting with the layout or template framing. There’s really only one way to properly check this out and that’s with a test email.
5. The Test Email. Ok, it’s been mentioned twice now so you should know to send a test email. But when sending a test email, make sure you check out what that looks like on both mobile and desktop. Sometimes an error only shows up on mobile layout. Other times, it’s just easier to catch things on mobile because of the way our eyes read content when it’s just down a few words per line.
6. Analytics. Every email campaign has an option for how you want to track analytics. Make sure you’ve switched that on and set it to gather the data you need. Each platform is different but since this is a series of options you opt-in for, it often gets overlooked in favor of producing the actual campaign itself. But this is important, so don’t overlook it.
7. The Call to Action. Each campaign needs to have a clear purpose. In other words, what do you want people to do with the information they’re presented? Make sure that call to action is crystal clear. More often than not, it doesn’t even exist.