Stop me if this sounds familiar. You’re an email marketer with a big campaign coming up. You create your email, import your subscribers, segment your list, etc. To make sure everything goes smoothly for the big send, you send test emails out beforehand to other members on your team for review, various domains, and hopefully even a testing tool like Pivotal Veracity. Everything works beautifully.
And then…something doesn’t work. Maybe you catch a typo the day after you hit the send button. Maybe your CRM integration doesn’t work quite as planned. Maybe someone else on your team mistakenly deletes a profile attribute you need, or you forget to add a Forward to a Friend button. Whatever the case may be, all those days of careful and cautious testing can go down the tube pretty quickly.
It happens to all of us. Evidence: a version of our October InSight was accidentally sent twice to a small group of subscribers. Ugh. While no one factor was to blame, looming deadline + miscommunication + technical issue + haste = embarrassing duplicate send.
We were lucky – the list was small, the impact was minimal, our metrics for the month were extremely strong, and InSight subscribers are a surprisingly forgiving bunch. Now that the smoke has cleared, it’s easy to see that this problem could have been prevented had our pre-send testing environment exactly matched our real send environment. So if you’re an email marketer, learn from our mistake. Here are some tips (a.k.a lessons learned) to help:
- Your Test is Not a Test.
Adding even one “untested” variable into the mix come send time can have serious repercussions. So treat your test like the real thing. Sending to an integrated list and a non-integrated group? TEST. Scheduling a send with a 15-minute throttle? TEST. Sending in Multi-Part MIME? TEST. TEST. TEST. Sending with various language encodings? Yep, TEST THAT TOO. - The More Eyes the Merrier.
Send out your email to as wide of audience as possible for review. For example, we send out an “FYI” version of InSight to our entire sales and services teams 24-hours before we complete the send to our subscribers. Each month, I am surprised (and extremely grateful) for the feedback that comes in. I’d rather our internal teams point out a typo or a misdirected link than one of our subscribers (and they will!) - Put Yourself on Lockdown.
We’ve recently started enforcing a 24-hour lockdown on our newsletter. This means that no matter what, the newsletter has to “sit” with no changes for a full 24 hours before we send it. This helps minimize last-minute changes that could be disruptive, and also provides more time for more eyes to review it. In fact, we’ve found this to be so helpful we’re looking to bump the lockdown up to 72 hours.
- Balance Deadlines with Double-Checking.
I’m a firm believer in deadlines. But there comes a point when, quite simply, you have to be flexible with deadlines in order to not compromise the integrity and validity of your tests. Know when to back off for the sake of your send. If that moment of hesitation flashes before you hit the send button, don’t do it! You should feel confident – not anxious – when you hit the send button.
If you have more testing / preparation tips to share, we’d love to hear them!
Cheers,
Ashley Sales
Manager, Marketing Communications
