Your Ultimate Email Holiday Checklist

Ultimate email holiday checklist

Your lists are cleaned, email creatives have been designed. You are just about ready to send! Before you watch your hard work, use this handy checklist to make sure your are cleared for the email skies and are set to cut through the noisy holiday inbox.

Ultimate email holiday checklist
Ultimate email holiday checklist

1. Do you have a responsive subject line?

Test your subject line on various devices, email clients and browsers, because it may cut off in different places depending on the size of the preview screen. Maximize the first few words to drive the highest click-through rate. If you are giving a promotion or running a contest, you will want to make sure that is understood in the beginning of the subject line.

2. Is your subject line personal?

Have you considered using personalization in your subject line? According to the Adestra July 2012 report, personalized subject lines are 22.2% more likely to be opened. Do keep in mind however, if you have used first names in your subject lines before, the second time won’t be as effective. Try to hack at your data in other ways, like incorporating the customer’s last purchase/interaction or geography into the subject line.

3. Did you check commonly misspelled words?

There are those words that we all can’t help but mispell – I mean misspell – from time to time. When talking to a few Mailjetters to get a round-up of easy to misspell words, they said: necessary, cooperation, acknowledgement and accommodate.

Make sure you are using spell check and do not be afraid to recruit the help of a fellow teammate to proof your work for grammar or homonym mistakes. It is often helpful to have a fresh pair of eyes scan over the copy, because when you are working on something for too long, you can easily glance over mistakes.

4. Are all of the links functional?

Test all of the links in the body to make sure they are clickable and are leading to the correct landing page. This can be done manually, in which case the shortcut to close out of a tab for Mac and PC are Command + W and CTRL + W respectively. You can also save time by using a tool like Litmus to automatically test for you.

5. Have you tested your email content?

It is recommended to use multi-variable testing (A/B or A/X testing) your content on a smaller porting of your list before blasting to the rest of your list. Some things to test are frequency (this one takes a bit more planning and time), call-to-action (placement, copy or design and color), and sender name (sending from the company vs. from an individual).

6. Are you sending at an optimal time of day and day of week?

Even if you haven’t run frequency tests (as mentioned above), you can dig through past data from the year to analyze which times your customers were most active. Be sure to reference your segmented contact lists when reading this data, to customize your send time for maximum ROI.