Last-minute quality checks
Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow
Hopefully, you're not like me, where the email quality control process looks roughly like this:
Step A Send the email
Step B Wait for my friend Edwin to tell me which part of the email screwed up this week
No, we should all be more like Wendy Roth, who has an eight-point checklist for you to go through before you hit the send button.
She covers such issues as legal compliancy, doublechecking links, tracking and unsubscribe functions, ensuring your headers are in order, and similar.
For the record, the two commonest problems I suffer from are:
1. Minor coding errors, involving a failure to close a HTML tag properly or similar. Having a good template or wysiwyg editing tool can eliminate those kinds of issues.
2. Slipping up with the text version. Often the text version of an outgoing email is an afterthought and hurriedly cobbled together by copying and pasting bits of the HTML version. As a result, errors can slip in.
Pasting text across from the HTML version, for example, means a linked word becomes an unlinked word in the text version, and it's all too easy to forget to manually append the link to it.
So the HTML...
Here's a great article about subject lines
...becomes...
Here's a great article about subject lines
Also, don't rely on the text version your service or software might create for you automatically from your nice HTML email. They can look pretty horrible. Text email design is its own art and science and deserves appropriate care and attention.
More on email design | Tags: email marketing, email campaign management
Step A Send the email
Step B Wait for my friend Edwin to tell me which part of the email screwed up this week
No, we should all be more like Wendy Roth, who has an eight-point checklist for you to go through before you hit the send button.
She covers such issues as legal compliancy, doublechecking links, tracking and unsubscribe functions, ensuring your headers are in order, and similar.
For the record, the two commonest problems I suffer from are:
1. Minor coding errors, involving a failure to close a HTML tag properly or similar. Having a good template or wysiwyg editing tool can eliminate those kinds of issues.
2. Slipping up with the text version. Often the text version of an outgoing email is an afterthought and hurriedly cobbled together by copying and pasting bits of the HTML version. As a result, errors can slip in.
Pasting text across from the HTML version, for example, means a linked word becomes an unlinked word in the text version, and it's all too easy to forget to manually append the link to it.
So the HTML...
Here's a great article about subject lines
...becomes...
Here's a great article about subject lines
Also, don't rely on the text version your service or software might create for you automatically from your nice HTML email. They can look pretty horrible. Text email design is its own art and science and deserves appropriate care and attention.
More on email design | Tags: email marketing, email campaign management
Permalink | April 05, 2007 |
0 comment(s)
Get posts like this: as an RSS feed | biweekly email | via Twitter
Get posts like this: as an RSS feed | biweekly email | via Twitter
0 Comments:
Comments closed for this post
