When you send emails, you want them to be as effective and informative as possible. How successful they are largely depends upon their content, but more minor issues, such as typos, vague sender information, and broken links can have a seriously detrimental impact on their performance. Before you send out your email, take a moment to check the following steps:
Proofread
Be sure to check your email for spelling and grammar errors prior to sending it out. These errors can damage your organization’s professional reputation and make your recipients less likely to pay attention to your message. The ClickDimensions block, freestyle, and drag and drop email template editors include a spellchecker to streamline this process for you.
Use clear From Name and From Email values
Make sure that the values you use for your From Name and From Email on your Email Send clearly indicate who you are in order to avoid confusing your recipients. If they do not recognize who the email is from, they are less likely to interact with it, thus damaging your open and click rates. If you encounter a situation where your company name changes or you merge with another company, consider discussing this change within an email prior to changing the From Name/Email in case your recipients are not yet aware of the name change.
Have backup values for dynamic content
Include a default value if you incorporate dynamic text into your emails. This will ensure that some content will be displayed even if the data you are trying to reference on your recipient’s record is not available. When you add dynamic text to your template, it will look something like this: ${Recipient.contact.firstname[0]!””}. You can type text between the quotation marks at the end of this dynamic text in order to display that text if the data you are referencing is not available. ${Recipient.contact.firstname[0]!”Customer”}.
Check your links
Make sure all of your links are functional prior to sending your email. Broken links will prevent your recipients from accessing your content and may make them less likely to try again in future emails. Beyond ensuring that your original links are functional, make sure your email CNAME is valid. When your email is sent out, your links will be branded with the CNAME you set in ClickDimensions settings and if the CNAME is not properly set up, it will break your links. If you find that your branded links are not working or if you want to confirm that your CNAME is properly set up prior to sending your email, you can learn how to do that here.
Check your template on mobile devices
An increasingly large percentage of emails are being read on mobile devices. Be sure to send test copies of your email to mobile devices to be sure that everything looks how you want it to. You can find some tips for designing mobile-friendly templates here. Also, keep a lookout for automatic web responsive design in our drag and drop template editor in our July release!
Check your subject line
Your subject line is the first part of your email that your recipient will see, so it is vital that it grabs their attention and gives them a good idea of the purpose of your email. As such, if you use a placeholder subject while testing your email, be sure to replace it with the real deal before you send the email out to your recipients. Sending out emails with the wrong subject line or with a subject line containing typos or grammatical errors can decrease your email open rate and harm your credibility.
Written by Rhys Saraceni, Marketing Success Manager at ClickDimensions
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