avoidemailGet some advice on how to avoid - or at least minimize - errors in email marketing. Mistakes happen in the largest and most successful companies. Depending on the error, the effects can range from embarrassing, but ultimately inconsequential bewilderment of the mail recipients, all the way to serious financial damages.

  • Mistakes can happen in many places, therefore watch out for the most typical sources of error first, such as:
  • spelling and grammatical errors (particularly problematic in the subject line);
  • incorrect or broken links;
  • links that are not tracked (in the perception of the user irrelevant but annoying for internal evaluation);
  • wrong image URLs;
  • false image dimensions (images too big, distorted representation, etc.);
  • HTML and character encoding errors;
  • lack of support of certain elements in popular email clients (for example, video/movie contents);
  • wrong sender;
  • inapt dispatch time;
  • lack of mail items (e.g. pre-header, SWYN buttons);
  • legal minimum requirements are not met (no imprint, faulty unsubscribe link, etc.);
  • selection of wrong target group;
  • incorrect selected sender;
  • wrong campaign assignment (if relevant for evaluation);
  • no or incorrect optimization for mobile devices.

Further, to avoid mistakes, you should perform a thorough quality check of each mailing prior to the sending. Modern email marketing solutions usually offer a range of integrated quality assurance measures, such as an automated verification of link and image functionality, link tracking, as well as a spam check. With the right email marketing software you can also perform display test for popular email clients and mobile devices.

In addition to software-based quality assurance measures, you should always perform a manual check. Create a checklist that (at least) contains the above-mentioned sources of error and go through the checklist prior to any mailing you are planning. Professional email marketing software makes it possible to link sending an email to an approval process, so that no email is sent without the necessary check.

By Daniela La Marca