A surprisingly underutilized element of email campaigns, preheaders appear under the subject line in the preview pane of the email client. On occasion, subscribers will click “reply” to marketing messages. Unless the goal is branding or providing information, every email should have a direct and simple call to action that allows recipients to click from any device. It will show how to the content renders across all combinations of devices and email clients. As you segment your audience based on, say, recent purchases or demographic data, make sure the offer and message are appropriate for the segment that you are sending to. Suppressing an audience from a campaign is easy to overlook. Make sure the suppression data is applied to the campaign — prior to deployment. Perhaps the most tedious task of preparing a marketing email is to check that every link is correct and functional. Nonetheless, confirm that featured items are in stock before the campaign deploys. Check that offer codes in your emails are active and working correctly.
An easy and cost-efficient way to kick-start sales is a timely email promotion. But in the haste of a tight turnaround or deadline, it’s easy to make email composing mistakes, to miss crucial elements or even errors and typos.
In this post, I’ll offer a checklist of 15 items that every marketing email should have. Print it and use it for your email deployments.
Checklist: 15 Email Essentials
Subject line. Subject lines should be short, concise, and instruct the recipient as to the content of the message, to generate interest. Use language that also steers the user to the desired conversion path. Check for typos.
Preheader. A surprisingly underutilized element of email campaigns, preheaders appear under the subject line in the preview pane of the email client. Do not repeat words or phrases from the subject line. Instead, use the preheader as an extension of the subject line to help generate further interest from readers.
Correct personalization. When using personalization in the subject line or body of an email, review and test the data to ensure it is being pulled in correctly. Use default values when data is missing. For example, use a default value of “Customer” when the first name is missing in your database.
Physical mailing address. To be CAN-SPAM compliant, every email marketing message must contain a physical mailing address.
Unsubscribe link. Another requirement of the CAN-SPAM…
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