Email Campaign Checklist: What to do Before Clicking Send

Email campaigns are an excellent way to stay in touch with your audience, clients, and leads. You can share content, updates, news, deals, and more with your email list. For a B2B business, it’s especially important to stay in front of your prospects.

The longer sales and decision-making cycle with B2B businesses means you need to make a consistent effort to stay top-of-mind. Your prospect may spend months researching a new provider or consultant. You want to be easily accessible when they make a decision.

Email marketing is an effective way to keep in touch with an audience because you have full control over your message and delivery, as opposed to social media or other platforms. It can also be an intimidating tool to use because of the many variables.

Use this checklist to make sure you cover all of the important steps of sending an email campaign.

1: THE BASICS

When you’re preparing an email campaign or newsletter, check the basics first. Check for spelling and grammar errors. Click every link to make sure it opens correctly. Make sure any dates & times or other details are correct. Simple things like this are easily overlooked.

2: CONTENT

The content of your email is the most important part. Review it objectively to determine if it’s a good fit for your audience. Do you need to segment your audience into groups to make sure the content is appropriate?

Choose an interesting subject line that makes people want to open the email. The rest of the content won’t matter if it’s never opened. It should be descriptive and enticing.

3: CALLS-TO-ACTION

What is the next action your reader should take? Every email campaign should have some type of call-to-action. Some emails will be purely focused on making a sale, and others will be content-based. Even with content-based emails, a simple call-to-action might be to share the article on social media. Don’t assume your audience will know what you want them to do. Make your call-to-action specific.

4: LEGALITY

There are certain laws you must follow when sending marketing emails. If you ignore them, you may end up with a large fine. These are the 2 main laws to keep in mind:

• Include a physical address in the footer. Many business owners try to skip this step, but it’s a legal requirement.
• Your list should only contain people who have given permission to receive your emails. Sending mass emails to cold addresses is considered spam.

5: TESTING

Before sending your email, send a test to yourself. Check the email layout on your desktop and mobile. There are also services available to test your email on many different email clients and phones. A popular service for this is Litmus.

I recommend sending emails that are more text-based rather than graphics-heavy. It’s easier to make your email look and function correctly if it’s mostly text.

6: ANALYZING

After you send your email, review your reports. Look at your open rates, click rates, and bounces. Most email marketing providers will automatically remove hard bounces from your email list. (A hard bounce is when an email is permanently undeliverable to an address).

Compare your stats from this email to your other email campaigns. Try to determine what worked or didn’t work this time. Was the subject line more compelling? Was your call-to-action more direct?

There are a lot of variables that go into sending an effective email. By following this checklist, you can avoid making embarrassing mistakes.

This article was originally published on rosypost.com.