Piggybacking off Jill Salzman's very excellent recent piece on how to send email newsletters people will actually read, here's some more supplementary reading: Inbound Internet marketing blog Hubspot has a post on Monday with a checklist of 13 things to check before sending out your next marketing email.
If you aren't totally bootstrapping things, you will be fortunate enough to be able to send out a test email. But if not, this list is extra great to heed before you hit "send." Common-sense tactics like checking all links, social-media sharing buttons and images for proper displaying are doled out, but some of the best ones come further down the list.
What these tips have in common is giving your intended recipients the option to view your email on their terms. If they've already opened your email, why not let them do so at their convenience? In other words, allow readers to open a web-based version of your email, assure the email is accessible across multiple devices and email clients and also make sure you optimize your email in both HTML and plain text. You can't assume anything when you're sending out a mass email, and as the Nielsen Norman Group has found that "many newsletters were poorly formatted for reading on small mobile screens" even though people are reading their emails more and more on their mobile devices. So, account for that.
For more, read the full list here.
David Wolinsky is a freelance writer and a lifelong Chicagoan. In addition to currently serving as an interviewer-writer for Adult Swim, he's also a columnist for EGM. He was the Chicago city editor for The Onion A.V. Club where he provided in-depth daily coverage of this city's bustling arts/entertainment scene for half a decade. When not playing video games for work he's thinking of dashing out to Chicago Diner, Pizano's, or Yummy Yummy. His first career aspirations were to be a game-show host.
