With 87% of B2B marketers using the email marketing channel and close to 75% of customers adopting email as their main channel for business communication, email marketing remains the most successful way to reach your audience online.

As a business already into email marketing or just about to begin, your goal is to captivate your reader's attention to respond to the call-to-action in the email campaign ads you sent to them. The last thing you want to do is to turn off potential customers simply because you send out the wrong sort of mail.

As such, it is essential to have by your corner the proper email marketing checklist, so you can seamlessly reach your target audience and keep their interest.

What is an email marketing checklist?

An email marketing checklist is a concise list of essential tasks and elements that need to be addressed when creating and sending marketing emails. It ensures that campaigns are well-structured, properly targeted, and effectively designed, leading to higher engagement and conversion rates in email marketing efforts.

Here are the top 30 things to keep in mind to ensure that your email marketing campaigns fetch you results.

Table of Contents

Getting to the Inbox

1. Avoid Spam Filters

If your emails keep landing in your subscriber's spam folder, then it's inevitable that you won't be getting great results from your campaigns. So, before you hit the send button, make sure the email you're sending does not have fishy links or too many images, as these would send negative signals to email providers and ensure that all future campaigns land in their spam folder.

2. Relevance

Honesty and consistency are the keys to staying relevant to your subscribers because they would constantly receive other emails asides from yours. If you suddenly disappear, or worse, you never send anything beyond the welcome letter, they'll forget you exist. Then, when you finally do send something, they'll unsubscribe because they will think you are spamming them.

Optimization

3. Optimize for Plain Text

Optimizing your emails for plain text helps to capture your readers' attention and increase their engagement.

Having your email sent in a plain text email would also give you a very high open and click-through rate compared to sending an HTML version view. This is because a larger version of your audience might not be able to view an HTML email or even worse, have your mail fly directly into their spam box.

4. Include Sharing Buttons

Never forget to include social media buttons in your emails because they always provide a secondary call to action.

This will increase your exposure to a market that you may never have been able to encounter without investing a huge amount of money.

5. Create Exclusive Offers

You can show your appreciation by sending only your email list subscribers exclusive offers and information, which are not available on your website or anywhere else. Such offers and information can be discounts, free delivery, case results, or any other deal that can attract them and encourage them to remain on your list.

6. Length

Every word and sentence in your email should serve a clear purpose since many individuals do not like to read lengthy texts. It's best to keep your sentences between 20-25 words and paragraphs under 2-3 sentences. Keeping emails short and concise makes it easier to get your point across to your audience.

7. Feedback

A customer's feedback plays a vital role in every business because their feedback most times gives insight on how you can grow your business. You can ask them questions about what they feel about your brand and follow up with people who shared feedback with you. It provides a way to build lasting relationships with customers and improve unhappy customers' experiences.

Customization

8. Avoid Generic Templates

It would help if you tried sending out professional or customized templates rather than a generic email. Any of these templates would reflect the fonts, color, and other branding elements of your website and business. Including this approach in your email marketing checklist, your recipients will easily recognize your business and also generate a feeling of trust.

9. Choose a Professional Email Address

For readers to engage and respond to your campaigns, using a professional email address is crucial to improving your credibility.

A professional email that you use for business purposes is necessary when dealing with clients as this helps you get their attention better. It's also good you have a professional photo that screams, "I am awesome at what I do!"

10. Frequency

You need to ask yourself how often you should send out your emails. Would it be daily? Weekly? or Monthly? Sending too many emails to your subscribers can become a big turn-off for them quickly. It is preferable to choose a send time in advance or experiment with different send times.

11. Provide Something of Value

Whether you sell a product or service, offering something of value can be incredibly beneficial. If what you are selling is not worth your customer's time, then it will be detrimental to your success. Always learn to give your readers what they want, and they will keep coming back for more.

Etiquette

12. Never Use All-Caps

Have you ever noticed that when a person uses all-caps in an online forum, even if it is one small paragraph or two quick sentences, people often get offended by it?

This happens in emails also.

Even if you're trying to make a point, do not write to someone with ALL-CAPS. It is interpreted as yelling, and no one wants to read emails where someone is yelling at them.

13. Put Your Audience First

When writing an email marketing copy, remember that your subscribers signed up on your list because they have a problem they believe you can solve. So, keeping the focus on them would make them feel connected with you and make it easier for you to sell to them.

14. Develop a Unique Voice

"Don't use that voice when talking to me." Did your Dad ever say that to you? Mine did, usually in response to a snarky comment about doing chores. He wasn't responding to what exactly I said but how I said it.

Your voice communicates your company’s personality; it's who customers "hear" when they read your copy. If your message or brand personality seems to change often, it would be harder for your audiences to figure out what you are all about.

Grabbing Attention

15. Links and Subject Lines

Without having an attention-grabbing subject line, your subscribers would not bother opening your emails. Statistics show that only 47% of email recipients open an email based on the subject line. What's more, you can easily have their attention using emojis or, better still, perform A/B testing.

Also, mistakes happen sometimes, and you might have broken links in your email. It is essential to verify that no link leads to an error page before sending out your mail.

16. Clear Email Address

Using clear contact information increases the authenticity of your emails, this builds trust with the customers and, subsequently, a good business relationship. Ensure you have a real email address your users can send a reply to; this enables them to engage and get quick responses to their questions and feedback for your analysis.

Increasing CTR

17. Images and CTA

Having strong visual designs on your emails is a proven way of optimizing your email performance. The visual content helps in passing across your message in ways that words might not be able to at times.

CTAs are vital parts of every successful email campaign because they help drive your end goals, increasing customer conversion. Additionally, using well-targeted CTAs is sure to boost your conversion rates because they help engage and guide the customers on what they need to do with your message.

18. Email Preview Across Devices

Most people have short attention spans, which means they cycle through content quite fast and almost always lose interest quickly. The way to safeguard your campaign against this is to provide an email preview across several devices.

An email preview is always short and attention-grabbing, with an appealing headline that introduces part of the message in your email. This method is effective and helps increase the open rate of your emails.

19. Tablet and Mobile Testing

With over 40% of emails being opened on mobile, having a responsive email template is necessary. This will create something that renders well on multiple screen sizes, giving you an edge over your competitors, as well as a higher click-through rate.

Also, customers are very likely to unsubscribe from a promotional list if it doesn't open on their mobile devices or tablets. So, make sure the email template's responsiveness is tested before sending it out to your list.

20. Sending Time

Picking your sending time is critical to your email campaigns' performance since this determines when subscribers are most likely to open your emails. Simple email copy could be sent out to customers to encourage engagement and interaction with the brand. At the same time, you can retarget those users with more personalized content in the evening.

Analyzing and Boosting Performance

21. Email Metrics and Analysis

Every email marketing campaign has its intended goals. Tracking your performance through metrics and analysis would show you how closer you are to your goals and how much progress you're making.

A good way to go about this would be to use a tool that specializes in tracking the progress of your email campaign and improving the overall performance of your marketing project. Such a tool tracks not only basic metrics but also allows you to optimize your conversion funnels, monitor the quality of your traffic, and manage your ad campaigns.

22. Engaging Copy

An interesting read is imperative for every marketing campaign, and this can be achieved by making sure every piece of information you send out is informative, accurate, and comprehensive.

By projecting out high-quality content that your ideal audience/buyer finds relevant and valuable, it becomes easier for you to grab attention from social media sites, Google results, or word of mouth.

23. Campaign Goals

Having clear email marketing goals is vital to creating an effective and intuitive email campaign.

Like a style guide, you should always have an intention for the emails you send. You could start by asking questions like: Am I trying to sell a virtual product, raise awareness of something? or trying to drive traffic to an eCommerce website?

Regardless of your objective, having a clear focus and campaign goal from the onset remains an essential part of your email marketing checklist.

24. Avoid Bombarding Your Subscribers With Emails

Unless you have important information or a product that can't wait, never bombard your subscribers with emails all day. Many people get mad when they only get stories designed to sell to them in almost every message.

Always try to spend a few minutes to think about the kind of reaction you'll make if you are the subscriber receiving the emails you're sending out. This would help you decide if sending the mail at that point is necessary or not, and, in the long run, reduce your unsubscription rate.

25. Segmentation

It is not new to marketers that effective email marketing results from proper segmentation. It is very important to segment your audience and consider the best way to approach them. As you keep segmenting your audience, your ROI will continue to increase.

You can also apply filters to easily group subscribers that share similar things in common during segmentation. They can be filtered based on gender, age, customer payments, subscription date, contacts' position, location, etc.

With this, you would easily find individuals in your database, keep them, and use the same filter some other time.

26. Personalization

Personalizing your email involves addressing each customer as an individual. With facts showing that close to 80% of consumers are more likely to purchase from brands that offer a personalized experience, or know their purchase history, is a big indicator that you need to send out personalized emails.

 

Quizzes, surveys, different researches, using your website, apps, emails - all of these ways are useful to personalize the content you create.

27. Unsubscribe Link

Having a clear link for the user to unsubscribe from your emails is very important. Ensure it isn't hidden and very easy to find so that subscribers can opt-out whenever they wish, even if you have permission to email them anytime. You do not need an audience that is not interested in what you have to say on your list.

Maintaining Engagement

28. Proofreading and Editing

Proofreading your email and checking for typos or spelling mistakes is always a worthwhile task. It's a popular saying that two pairs of eyes are better than one. So, getting someone to double-check for you is key too.

Also, using a spell checker tool such as Grammarly or alternatives of Grammarly to fish out errors is a great idea. However, it is advisable to proofread manually after using tools since they aren’t perfect.

29. Set up Your Autoresponders

Maintaining the consistency of the emails you send out to clients is an effective email marketing strategy that should be prioritized. To make sure that you remain in your subscribers' minds, take pride in sending out emails consistently.

Autoresponders in email marketing platforms like SendX are developed to send out your scheduled emails based on your preference. Unlike regular campaigns, automation is a targeted email or series of emails you can set and forget. Hence, adopting this technique is an excellent move.

30. Monitor Your Email Bounce Rate

Removing hard-bounced email addresses from your list is something you need to do regularly when cleaning your list.

There is no reason to keep them because they are inactive, meaning that no matter the email you send, it will never get to your audience. However, to reduce your email bounce rate, all you need to do is clean up these hard-bounced emails once they pop.

Bottom Line

There you have it. A great email marketing checklist will help you to remain focused and on track without becoming distracted and unproductive. All you need to do is to implement every point listed out, and you'll be taking the email marketing system by its horns.

FAQs

1. How can I avoid SPAM filters?

In order to avoid SPAM filters, before you hit the send button, make sure the email you're sending does not have fishy links or too many images, as these would send negative signals to email providers and ensure that all future campaigns land in their spam folder.

2. Why should I include social media sharing buttons in my email?

Social media buttons in your emails provide a secondary call to action. They will increase your exposure to a market that you may never have been able to encounter without investing a huge amount of money.

3. What should be the length of my email?

Many individuals do not like to read lengthy texts. It's best to keep your sentences between 20-25 words and paragraphs under 2-3 sentences. Keeping emails short and concise makes it easier to get your point across to your audience.