 You wouldn't drive your car for 50,000 miles without changing the oil and checking the tires. If you've let an entire year go by without getting under the hood of your email marketing program, you don't know what's working and what's about to break down the next time you send.
Testing the mechanicals is just one of the items that need to be checked or tested in your email program. See how well your email program performs according to these essential diagnostics:
EmailLabs' Top 10 Check-up Points
1. Test your opt-in process to make sure it works and to see how it functions from the user's reference point.
Take a minute to walk yourself through your site's opt-in process, especially if it has been a year or more since you designed or tweaked it.
Your first question: Do all the links work? Do they send you to the pages you expect, such as a registration or confirmation page?
Next: How many clicks does it take to complete the opt-in, including clicking a confirmation link in a follow-up email? Usability rules say the fewer clicks required, the more likely the user will complete the process. Two clicks is ideal, three is reasonable, and four or more means you're more likely to see users abandon the opt-in.
2. Have a human monitor all incoming mailboxes.
You should try to automate your email marketing or publishing program as much as you can, with no need to supervise opt-ins, opt-outs, registration changes, targeting and segmentation, etc.
However, remember that there's a human being behind each email address, and they are capable of just about anything, including not following your own directions for opting in, opting out, sending feedback or otherwise contacting you.
That's why you need to designate someone, either in your department or in your company's IT department, to monitor all email mailboxes associated with your program to watch for misdirected opt-outs, complaints and comments.
Most especially, this includes the email address you use to send your messages. No matter how many times you tell people not to reply to the message with opt-outs or comments, or how easy your feedback or unsubscribe process is, they're going to hit "reply" instead. Someone must monitor that mailbox to catch and route personal replies.
3. Review message content, design and performance across platforms and email clients.
It used to be you'd have to test your email message on Macintoshes as well as PCs, and in different email clients like Outlook, AOL and Yahoo to make sure it rendered correctly. Now there are many more email clients to test, and you must add in mobile devices like Treos and BlackBerries, which don't handle HTML and rich text well.
If you haven't test-driven your messages and templates on computers other than those in your department or your designer's, do it now before your next campaign goes out. If you use a third-party email service provider to manage your email program, it might offer a testing service that can do this for you automatically.
EmailLabs clients, for example, have access to EmailAdvisor, which analyzes the content and shows how it displays in different email clients with images enabled or disabled.
4. Optimize both ends of the email relationship.
New names grow old fast on the typical mailing list. Our own research shows interest, as judged by opens and clicks, starts to drop off as early as the first couple of weeks after opt-in. You need to act fast to get newcomers engaged enough to continue opening your messages and clicking on your offers.
We prepared a detailed action plan to get newcomers into the fold quickly. Read it here.
It isn't enough to nurture newcomers, though. You also need to do more than just say good-bye to people leaving your list, especially if they take the time to unsubscribe properly instead of merely fading away or hitting the spam-complaint button in a misguided attempt to quit.
Although you must stop emailing as soon as the owner asks to unsubscribe, you should confirm the unsubscribe in a follow-up email or on the landing page. Include in it both a link to a short exit survey, directions on how to re-subscribe if the unsubscribe was a mistake and maybe even an offer to sweeten the pot.
5. Review all co-registration sources, and monitor by source to see how they perform.
Co-registration, in which you cross-promote your email offerings with third parties, can be a fast and inexpensive way to build your list, especially if you don't have a lot of resources.
However, co- registration has two big down sides: You can't always control what other businesses listed along with you in the co-registration deal do. Also, the people who sign up for your program may not be as motivated as the ones who sign up at your site or through a message forwarded from a friend.
How long has it been since you checked out your co-registration deals? Examine the opt-in page to see who else is being listed with you and the registration page to make sure it still works, contains your branding, and the permission level has not changed.
You also need to monitor how well these names perform and whether they are responsible for more than their share either of business or problems, such as bad addresses and spam complaints. Segregate the names into a sublist and compare them on key metrics with your general database. If the numbers are bad, discontinue the co-registration partnership.
6. Test all links in all email messages, transactional as well as commercial, especially your unsubscribe link.
One of the key provisions in CAN-SPAM, the U.S. law regulating commercial email, is that you must include a working Web-based unsubscribe mechanism in each commercial email message. Do you know if yours is working? There's a good chance it might not be.
In a purely unscientific study, I tried to unsubscribe from about 20 email programs recently. Over half of the links did not work, and I received no response from the other half.
As simple a step as this might be, not checking each time to make sure your unsubscribe process works could lull you into a false sense of compliance. The Federal Trade Commission, which enforces CAN-SPAM, recently charged email service provider Yesmail with failing to honor unsubscribe requests within 10 days. The company paid a $50,717 fine to settle the case.
You should test every link in every campaign message you send to make sure each one works. But with the unsubscribe process, follow it through to the confirmation. Using a seed address, one that's on your list specifically to track rendering and deliverability, unsubscribe the address and take every required step to complete the process. Then, check the database to make sure the address has been either deleted or moved to an internal do-not-email list.
7. Review your message templates to check codes, CAN-SPAM compliance, usability, potential spam content and working links.
Coding often needs to be cleaned up, especially if more than one person has access to it. Also, spam is a moving target for anti-spam filters and software installed on corporate and ISP servers. A line of code or content that did not offend last year might have suddenly become a major spam signature this year, and you need to stay ahead of the changes.
For more information, read Seven Steps to a Better Template.
8. Evaluate message design for blocked images and preview panes.
Blocked images and preview panes became a major issue in 2006, when Web email providers including Yahoo!Mail and Hotmail added preview panes to their email clients, allowing readers to view a portion of the message before deciding whether to open or delete it.
If you have not already done so, redesign your email message templates to deliver maximum information in the top 2 to 4 inches, and increase your creative use of HTML fonts and colors, while relying less on the use of images that ISPs or recipients' email clients might block.
Also, create more robust ALT tags, or HTML code that describes and image and appears instead of it if the recipient blocks images. Use three to five words, or more if the image is large, to describe the action desired, the image or the offer.
For more information, read Designing Email for the Preview Pane and Disabled Images.
9. Review message frequency and sending schedule.
Are you sending too frequently, or not often enough? This is a hard call to make, because it's often not clear whether you would gain ROI by increasing mailings by one or two a month or lose it because you would aggravate recipients into unsubscribing, hitting the spam complaint button or going into hiding to escape you.
However, it's time to review your email program's performance over the last 12 months. If you're sending less frequently than weekly or even bi-weekly, your list might be going to sleep in-between sends.
Stepping up your frequency by one or two mailings in a cycle could bring you added revenue but also cost you subscribers. You also can't move mailings up beyond the level you promised subscribers or that they chose when they registered. Moving from a weekly to a daily schedule could create havoc, but moving from a monthly schedule to perhaps bi-weekly might not have the same effect.
How will you know? Test first and watch both the positive indicators – opens, clicks, conversions, sales, order size per sales, etc. – and the negative ones, including spam complaints and unsubscribes.
EmailLabs has developed a two-part strategy for reviewing your own frequency rate and calculating the effects of increasing frequency. Start here: Calculating the Cost of Increasing Email Frequency
10. Keep your list clean with periodic removal of inactive addresses.
It's true: Half of your mailing list, maybe even more if you don't email it often enough, has gone inactive on you. They're still out there, but they aren't opening, clicking or buying. And you need either to clean out the deadwood or find a way to wake them up.
First, you need to find out how many addresses have not responded in a certain time period. Segment your database by addresses that generated no clicks or opens in six months. Create a special message inviting recipients to opt in again, update preferences or take advantage of a special offer. After a week or so, go back into the segment and delete any address that hasn't responded.
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