Are You Scared to Click the "Launch" Button for Your Email Campaigns?

Do you ever get that nervous feeling when you click to launch your email marketing campaign? You do it, but then you might quickly cancel it because you need to take just one more look at your content.

It's ok, I'm talking you off the ledge. It happens to me and the team here all the time. You need to make sure you've selected the proper list to mail it to and you need to make sure your copy and images are correct.  You have to make sure your anchor tags really work and you don't really remember if you've enabled forward-to-a-friend. Maybe you copied your campaign but never changed the subject line from a previous mailing! So you resend yourself the test of the campaign that you really need to get out the door now. It's MADDENING!

So here it is again, your checklist for clicking the "Launch" button, without being scared.

Comments

[Email Direct Marketing]

That is so me! I have had that many emails from people in the past that are immediately followed by a "sorry, we got something wrong" that I am always convinced that I will get it wrong.

I always send a test or two to different email addresses some hosted and some free hotmail etc, to make sure it works in all viewers.

Thanks for the tips.

James

[Kelly D. Wagner]

My coworker and I actually had to motivate each other to let go of the testing and the proofing, "send! send! it's okay. hit send!"

[Janine Popick]

For Dave: If you're talking about the testing post and how many days you need to have of response data before you roll out to the rest of your list, you usually have a pretty good feel in 24 hours. We just wait a day.

[Scott Ragan]

Ha! I thought it was just me who experienced the hour of sweat right after hitting the "send" button on my e-newsletter. And how relieved we all are when we discover the e-mail is a compliment on that issue or campaign!

[Vern]

I will be giving copies of this to the staff at our church, so they will be able to e-mail their own lists. Then I will be able to do other things.
Great resource, thanks

[Claire Diiorio]

I've just printed this out and stuck it to my noticeboard. Thank-you for providing this very useful checklist. I've had writing an email checklist on my Action Plan for a while, so now I can cross it off. One less thing to do, so thanks again and I wish you all a Happy New Year!

[Dave @ TimeTrade]

My comment above wasn't clearly worded. Janine, I wondered how many days YOU allot in your timeline for this testing and the ensuing repair.

[Dave @ TimeTrade]

So here's a juicy question for relative newbies: in your timeline, how many days do you allot for satisfying the timeline? i.e. by when must all the content be ready for debugging, in order to hit the actual drop date?

Our two biggest challenges (we are not VR users (yet?)) are (1) test emails don't go into spam folders but the real one does, and (2) HTML content that simply WILL not display correctly in both Gmail and Outlook, never mind AOL and Entourage and Outlook Express and everything else. Are these problems as common as they seem to be for us, or are we using inept partners?

[Erin Doherty]

I'm laughing, because this sounds like me. I'm just getting started with email marketing. Thanks for the tips!!

[Karla]

Great advice! Sending out an e-mail campaign stressing me so much that I dread checking my e-mail in case someone replies and tells me the personalization feature didn't work (yes, it happened to me once, but I've forgiven myself now).

[Michael Carnell]

This is excellent. Just what the doctor ordered. Sending a link to a bunch of people who need this...

[Sherra Scott ~ Virtual Assistant]

That is a wonderful resource for anyone who's getting ready to launch an email campaign, even "veterans". It's so easy to overlook the little things.

[Martin Thompson]

Perfect. Thankyou.