A lot goes into crafting an impressive email marketing campaign – from creating compelling copies to fine-tuning their calls-to-action (CTAs) and nailing the email designs just to get subscribers to open their emails. That being said, a broken email in their recipient’s inbox is the worst nightmare for an email marketer. Let alone the subscriber experience, a broken email can tarnish the brand image amongst subscribers.
Hence, it’s essential to be sure before sending any promotional emails. Today, we’ll look at some of the fundamental email marketing elements that you should definitely check before hitting that send button.
In the Inbox
The Subject line-Preview Text duo
Your email’s appearance plays a crucial role in getting your subscribers to open it. Conversion is impossible if your email isn’t even opened. As per a recent report, “33% of email recipients open emails because of catchy subject lines.” Hence, it won’t be an understatement to say that subject line is the key to a successful campaign.
For more and more recipients to read your subject line, you must ensure that they can see your full subject line across multiple devices. Along with that, you need to make sure the preview text is according to the subject line’s context. If you are featuring any dynamic content (like your recipient’s first name), make sure it’s displayed as per your inbox view.
These practices would encourage more recipients to open your emails and would reduce most of the inbox anomalies.
Using professional services like Marketo certified experts or Mailchimp email experts would ensure that you are getting these critical fundamentals right in the subscriber journey. These services help you with your inbox content and elevate the appeal of your entire email marketing campaign.
In the email body
Broken images
Many email clients automatically break or block your images. This makes it even more crucial to test your images and include fallbacks if clients don’t display them by default. This practice would help you still deliver your message across.
Before sending any emails, ensure that your images work fine and that your placeholder images are replaced. In case you are using a template, it can create issues since most of the email clients are fickle. To ensure a delightful subscriber experience, you must double-check your email images.
ALT text
It’s not uncommon to see broken images getting blocked; hence, you need to feature ALT text to ensure that your message gets delivered even when the clients do not display your email images. ALT text, or alternative text as we know it, is a text description of your image which gets displayed if the image fails to render. This practice also gives your emails a sense of accessibility to your emails, since it delivers content to both the email clients, those who don’t support images and those who deploy screen readers.
Don’t let the use of ALT text rob the visual oomph of your email. You can always incorporate styled ALT text as per your branding and make your email stand out. However, always test it before sending it. Testing would validate if your ALT text is appearing for blocked images and whether it is in context with the images that are not being displayed.
Default content
Well, this is the tricky part. Since automation has intruded to such an extent in email marketing, it’s hard to distinguish between the default content and the original content. But you must make sure that your emails do not contain default copy. It’s indispensable to double-check that there is no default content in your email before sending it. These sorts of mistakes radiate embarrassment and unprofessionalism about your brand, which harms conversions in the long run.
You need to keep a hawk’s eye on default copies like “Lorem Ipsum” or “INSERT THIS HERE” in your emails, especially if you create your copies directly into email editors or ESP tools.
However, given the higher efficiency and customizability, you should never refrain from using an email template. Service providers like Pardot email templates or Salesforce email templates will save a lot of effort and time and keep your entire email campaign game ahead of the curve.
Links
Each email campaign has pre-defined goals and measurable metrics before being launched. These goals define what you want to achieve out of that particular campaign. It can be anything: getting your subscribers to register for an event, buying a deal, or even making them read a blog.
All these actions are made possible by links. Your entire campaign will fall flat on its face if it features a broken link. It’s imperative to cross-check that all the links mentioned in your email work fine with correct tracking parameters to see that action post-click.
Extras
Dynamic Content
When you are done with everything obvious, have one good look at the dynamic content (if any) to ensure that it’s working fine. Just imagine you receive an email that says, “Hi [FNAME] !” These types of mistakes can ruin the entire subscriber experience and, in worst cases, can even lead to unsubscribes.
Wrapping Up
I know once you are done preparing the campaign, that temptation to send it is irresistible. But a slightly ‘delayed’ email is way better than the one with anomalies. So, follow the tips mentioned above and keep your campaigns hassle-free.
Wrapping Up
Kevin George is Head of Marketing at Email Uplers, one of the fastest growing full service email marketing agency that specializes in crafting professional email templates, PSD to HTML email conversion and free HTML email templates in addition to providing email automation, campaign management, and data integration & migration services. He loves gadgets, bikes, jazz and eats and breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on his blog.