What is email send anxiety? It’s when you’ve created an email complete with content and you’ve been hovering the mouse over the “Send” or “Schedule” button for about an hour wondering if it’s really ready. After much time in crafting the perfect email, how do you know if you’re ready to send it? Here is a simple checklist to run through before scheduling (and repeatedly rescheduling) an email to send or sending an email right away.
Compelling Subject Line
Be sure it’s a subject that won’t be considered too much of a sales pitch. Add a personal touch by placing the subscriber’s first name in the subject if you have everyone’s first name.
Preview Line
A preview line with a call to action or brief summary of what they’re about to see when they open their email. Keep this line to about 10 characters.
Header
An attractive header image created by a graphic designer or downloaded with permission for commercial use. Sometimes you will find them for free or cheap.
Body
One to two paragraphs addressing the reason for your email, why it’s important, and call to action to be taken by the reader.
Links
Insert any relative images or links.
Proof
Read through all of your copy from the subject line through the image captions – everything! Read it out loud. Start from the beginning and check for punctuation, then back again for grammar, then back again for spelling. Make sure your selected list names are correct with spelling and capitalized if using subscriber names.
Test
Send a test message to yourself or a single individual contact. *Note: This is not to be confused with the test email feature in most email content management tools. Send a real message to one person! If necessary create a duplicate of your message to be sent to only one person so you don’t accidentally send to your entire list prematurely.
Review
Open the test message, read every letter of copy, test all links.
Revise
Go back to original drafted message campaign, correct any errors in the primary message to be sent.
Final review and test.
Once your message is free of errors, launch!
Keep in mind, each email software tool may provide certain content areas in a different layout per email.
Taking a few extra minutes or even days to send an email for your company is better than sending an email with errors only to have to send a “woops” email right after. More important than growing your email list is retaining subscribers. Without a consistent base of subscribers the list will not grow. Maintain a gap between gained and lost subscribers and the growth trend will continue. A simple typo could make the difference in gaining 100 subscribers and losing 1000. Happy email sending!
Written By Anais Sori
