Your 10-Point Quality-Control Checklist

It's every email sender's nightmare to launch a bug-filled campaign where everyone will see your mistakes. But, if you exercise strict quality control all along the production line, you'll reduce your potential exposure and send campaigns with confidence, even the last-minute ones.

Stefan Pollard shares this 10-Point Checklist:

1. I am sending to the correct list.
2. I proofread all the text in Notepad before having it coded for my HTML messages.
3. I verified that the offer or other purpose for sending the message is the correct one.
4. I included an unsubscribe link and street address as required by CAN-SPAM. (Or, I included all the elements my country's commercial-email regulations require.)
5. These identifying elements are present and accounted for:
• The subject line is filled in with text that accurately represents the email message content. --
• The "from" line shows my company or brand name, not an email address. 
• Any dates, especially copyright, reflect the correct year. 
• My company contact information, including name, street address, telephone numbers, Web site and email address for questions or concerns.
6. I clicked every link and link-connected image to make they all work and checked to make sure each image has an alt tag describing the content.
7. I previewed the message in my preview pane and with images disabled, in different browsers and on different computer platforms.
8. I proofread my text message and included the link to my message on the Web.
9. I had one other person look it over before I hit "send."
10. I tested my body copy and HTML coding with a delivery monitoring tool to make sure it doesn't trigger spam filters.

Source: EmailLabs

Comments

[Computer Consultants Kit]

Hi Tamara,

Although e-mail marketing has been heavily utilized by businesses of all sizes for 10+ years, the best practices have really only started coming together during the past 5 years or so.

And while many of these best practices will likely change and evolve over time, this is really an excellent checklist from EmailLabs.

So many e-mail marketers either embarrass their companies or risk alienating their constituencies by getting careless about simple QC checklist issues.

Thanks for the great post and for raising awareness of this often overlooked issue.

Best,

Joshua Feinberg