Whether it’s an unfortunate typo, a rendering issue, a broken link, or any other potential problem … email errors are embarrassing and costly. What’s your email team doing to avoid mistakes? If you’ve ever wondered how your strategy and processes measure up to that of your peers, this exclusive report from Email on Acid and Holistic Marketing reveals the answers.
Introduction
The most nerve-wracking moment in any email marketer’s life comes when it’s time to push the “Send” button. Here’s a sample of what goes through even the most seasoned email veteran’s mind:
- Did we replace the default subject line and pre-header?
- Did we use the right offer or the right promo code?
- Did we add the right images?
- Are we sending to the right audience?
- Did we spell anything wrong?
- Is the personalisation correct?
- Did I use the correct merge tags for my ESP?
- Does it look right on any device my subscribers use to read it?
- Is it accessible for as many of my subscribers as it can be?
- Do I have time to run it through the link checker one more time?
It doesn’t matter how simple or sophisticated the email creation process is or whether the email team is one person pulling all the levers or a distributed team of 20 or more. Errors have a way of slipping past the data team, proofreaders, list managers, and anyone with a hand in the process.
Errors happen to everybody, right?
Every email marketer has a story about something going haywire in even the most carefully plotted email campaigns. After all, errors are a fact of life in email marketing – or are they?
Aside from anecdotes shared on public forums, at conferences or marketer Happy Hours, what’s the state of play with email errors? There’s little or no empirical research measuring error rates, where errors are happening, and what teams are doing to detect and reduce errors.
Until now, that is.
What you’ll learn in this study
This report opens a window into the pre-deployment and error-management processes used by email teams large and small, at companies that sell to consumers, businesses or both, in the US, the UK, Canada, and all around the globe.
Findings will answer these key questions:
- What are the most common errors that email teams make?
- Do most teams check emails manually or use an automated process to detect errors?
- What factors correlate with higher error incidences?
- Which teams are more likely to use formal pre-deployment processes?
- Who gets the final say on an email campaign or automation series?
- Which elements of the email message are teams more likely to test before sending?
How to use this report to improve your email pre-deployment process
First and foremost, this report will show you how email teams like yours are faring with mistakes, and how they manage the pre-deployment process. Use the findings to compare your team’s methods and results with marketing teams in general and with teams comparable to yours in size, market area (B2B, B2C or both), and pre-deployment processes.
Use this as a resource for understanding the state of play in email creation, testing, and approval. Use it to benchmark your own team’s efforts and discover where you are outperforming your marketing peers or where you might detect areas to improve.
Our findings can also help you build a case for additional budget to overhaul your pre-deployment process, especially if you have been considering whether to replace a manual process with an automated platform to reduce human errors.
“You can have the best creative with the best offer with the best segmentation, but it will all fall flat if there is an error in the email. Nothing can take the place of having a solid process before you hit the send button to ensure an error-free email.” – Andrew Kordek, Founder of The Email Realist.
Major findings
- Errors increase when pre-deployment testing isn’t done on every email. Six in every 10 respondents who don’t test every email reported sending an email with at least one mistake.
- More than 50 per cent of respondents follow a written pre-deployment checklist. Larger email teams are more likely than single-person departments or smaller teams to use checklists during pre-deployment.
- Pre-deployment testing remains a manual process for most marketers, regardless of team size or frequency of sending.
- As team size increases, so does confidence that emails are error-free. Heavier senders – brands that send more campaigns in a shorter amount of time – are more likely to send mistakes in emails. Copy errors, wrong links/CTAs, and wrong audience are the most common errors.