You’ve created quality marketing content and you’re ready to unleash it on your clients and prospects. While the content creation is certainly the heaviest lifting when it comes to email marketing, your work isn’t done just yet. No, before you click and send that email, you’ve still got a few steps left to ensure you get the most out of your marketing efforts and don’t look foolish or unprofessional in the process. Here are a few last-minute elements you should always carefully go over before sending a marketing email.
Proofread that subject line one more time
While a typo isn’t acceptable anywhere in a marketing email, the most critical location for one would be your subject line. The subject line is the one element most recipients of your email will lay their eyes upon. In addition, an error will surely stand out like a sore thumb here, as it can’t get lost in the clutter as it would in the body of your content. Carefully re-read your subject line one more time before clicking send, as it’s unlikely a spelling or grammatical error will go unnoticed here.
Double-check any dates and times
One of the most crucial pieces of data in a marketing email is a date or time. Including an erroneous date or time could result in recipients missing an event you’re promoting or missing out on a promotion that ends before you actually told them it would. If your webinar is 11:00 a.m. on December 5th but your marketing email tells recipients it takes place at 11:00 p.m. or December 6th don’t be surprised when no one is in attendance. Always double check any dates or times—including time zones—in your marketing content to make sure you’re providing your contacts with accurate information.
Look especially hard for typos spellcheck won’t catch for you
We’ve all grown to rely on the ever-handy spellcheck, but it’s hardly foolproof. Spellcheck only catches words that are truly misspelled, which can lead to embarrassing incidents such as using the word pubic instead of public. Even worse, certain profane words won’t be flagged by the average spellcheck tool, and a curse word in your marketing email could do irreparable damage to your reputation. While using spellcheck is always encouraged to help identify typos, carefully proofread your marketing content one last time looking for mistakes spellcheck won’t catch.
Give those hyperlinks a try
Your marketing emails will likely contain call-to-actions (CTAs) you want your recipients to click to generate an action, be it take them to a landing page or address an email to someone within your company. Before you send that email, be sure that clicking on the CTA will perform the desired result. Click it yourself to test it and ensure it takes recipients to the landing page you want them to visit (and the landing page actually loads) or generates an email to the properly spelled email address at your company.
These might seem like minor details, but they’re extremely significant in the big picture. Any of these mistakes can be the difference between a successful email marketing campaign and an unsuccessful one. So before clicking ‘send’, take a few minutes and follow these steps to help prevent a colossal blunder.