8 Suggested Items to Include in Your Email Marketing Checklist

Goal List
List down the specific goals you wish to achieve with your email. Once you’re done creating your email, use the checklist to verify whether all goals have been accomplished or not.

Outline and Format
It never hurts to have a draft and outline to work with. The details in your outline must then be included in your checklist. Reviewing them will allow you to determine if all key points have been properly addressed by your email. Secondly, make sure that your preferred format is included in your email marketing checklist. In most cases, your email marketing format would usually include but isn’t limited to subject header, introductory paragraph, body, conclusions, closing paragraph, call to action, and miscellaneous details.

Email Address Validation
There’s no point sending out an email if there’s no one to read it. Hence, take out your opt-in list and consider sending a confirmation email to verify whether all email addresses in your list are still active.

Testing Procedures
Try to think of the various tests your email must be subjected to for quality control.

Monitoring Results
Include in your checklist a periodic assessment period for your emails. Compute the conversion rate, click-through rate, referral rate, and any other applicable statistics for your email marketing campaign.

Previous Mistakes and Concerns
Include in your checklist a list of things you did wrong or overlooked in the past email. This will prevent history from repeating itself with your current email. Next, if there are any issues or concerns which you had promised your customers to address on your next email, include them in your checklist as well. It will remind you to address them as promised when you are in the process of formulating your latest email.

Email Versions
Some of your customers may prefer a text-only email while others may prefer graphic-heavy emails. If you are creating more than one version of your email, all versions with the appropriate reminders should also be included in your checklist.

Link Checking
Finally, remember to double-check all links pasted in your email to ascertain that they are clickable and that they do redirect your readers to the appropriate and functioning pages.

Make sure you have your email marketing checklist with you all the time. Remember to use this for monitoring and evaluating every email you send.

Make subscribing to your email marketing list your call to action.
Even blog posts adhere to the same format with most marketing articles. You start with a strong paragraph, proceed with the body, and finish with an equally strong call to action. In this case, your call to action should be for readers to join your email marketing list.

Naturally, making that your call to action won’t be appropriate if the rest of your blog post has no direct connection to your list. But we’ll get to that later. For now, it’s important to remember ending every post, if possible, with this kind of call to action.

Choose topics that can be related to your email marketing newsletter.
What’s your next newsletter issue about? Can you write a blog entry about it? It’s important to establish a clear connection between your blog entry and your email newsletter. Your blog entry should provide readers a reason to subscribe to your list.

As for the topics discussed, your blog entry doesn’t have to focus on exactly the same issue. It would help, but it’s not always necessary. If your email newsletter is talking about the latest pet luxury products in the market, consider writing in your blog about the newest pet food flavors. They may not be directly related, but they do still fall in the same general category and is sure to be of equal interest to them.

Don’t give everything away.
Let’s say your next email newsletter tackles the 7 top reasons why puppies are so difficult to train. Your blog entry could feature two out of the seven reasons you’ve mentioned. Leave the rest to their imagination and let your call to action remind them that they can read the continuation of your topic by signing up for your email newsletter.

Market your email newsletter.
Of course, lets not forget to write posts which simply focus on convincing people to subscribe to your list. Today’s blog entry, for instance, may focus on the five best reasons why teenagers should subscribe to your email newsletter. Next week, you can write about the greatest benefits one can enjoy upon subscribing to your email newsletter.

The great thing about blogging is that it’s your turf and you can say anything and as much as you want. Use it to your advantage and it’s sure to have a positive effect on your email marketing list!

This is the reason why email marketing still is the most effective way of promoting and selling a product. This also explains why a lot of internet sites desperately find ways for visitors to sign up to their site and give their email addresses to them for subscription. Now, you don’t have to wonder why people keep asking for an email address even if all you really wanted to do was to leave a very short comment on a blog entry.

Emails are very effective marketing tools. However, they only work if they are used the right way. First off, you need to have a big list of active emails where you’ll send your marketing materials. And no, it doesn’t just have to be a list of uncategorized email addresses. It has to be a targeted email address list. Targeted email addresses mean that the people owning the email address you’ll send your campaigns to are the type of people who are going to benefit from your product the most.

Squeezing an email address out of your prospect is not easy. Getting their permission for you to send marketing campaigns to them is another thing. If you are not too familiar in creating an opt-in page, it is best that you partner with another who is an expert in this field. This is one good email service to use. You can also partner with another site with a lot of traffic. Every time a customer clicks on the box that is related to your business or product, then you get their email address for promotional purposes.

Constructing the sales letter itself is quite a task. You need to make an email that is not only interesting but action oriented as well. Every promotional email is only given a maximum reading time of 5 seconds. So you have to capture your reader’s interest within 5 seconds or less. If your sales letter is not effective, then it will be deleted forever.

If you don’t have any talents in writing and copywriting, it is best that you hire an expert sales writer. This is another email service you might want to get for a long-term basis. Having a good writer on call will allow you to make as many new email advertisements as you might need.

Don’t Send Unsolicited Email
They won’t read it, and that’s best case scenario. What could be worse is that they’ll label your email as SPAM and you risk getting blacklisted by their email provider or have your account suspended or removed. And the worst thing that could happen is for your recipients to spread bad things about you, which you can’t really blame them for since you’re the one at fault. Yes, we know you had good intentions, but it’s just not enough. If you truly have nice news to share then surely you could convince them to give you their email addresses!

Do Build Your Email Opt-In List
Email marketing always starts with an email opt-in list. Opting-in signifies their approval of receiving emails from you. Now, you’re probably wondering how to build your opt-in list, right? First, you need to hook their interest: what could you offer that they’d want badly enough to opt-in to your list? This could be a promise to provide them valuable tips on your area of expertise or other freebies. You could give subscribers a preferential discount rate or some other privilege.

Do Subscribe to a Proper Format
Email marketing newsletters adhere to a general format. It all starts with the subject line: make good use of this. Make sure to call your readers attention, let them know that it’s not SPAM and that they did sign up for it. Lastly, make sure it contains the key topic of your email.

Next to this would be the salutations. Be sure to personalize your letter by addressing them directly and using your recipients name. Your introductory paragraph should be brief and detailed, the body of your email equally concise, and your closing paragraphs containing a summary and call to action.

Don’t Bombard Them with Emails
Consider contacting them on a weekly basis at the least. If, however, you think that what you have to say deserves daily contact then at least give your subscribers an option to receive your email either daily or in a digested form.

Do Offer Them a Chance to Unsubscribe
Lastly, let them know right from the start that they always have the option to unsubscribe. When you do, you’re also letting them know that you’re confident they won’t do that because what you have to share would be truly valuable to them.