10 Point Email Marketing Checklist

The 10-Point Checklist for Successful Email Marketing:
1. I am sending to the correct list.Double check your email is going to the right segmentation of your list. Click carefully! When you send duplicate or irrelevant messages, you increase the chance that you'll irritate recipients into reporting you as spam or unsubscribing from you.
2. I proofread all the text in Notepad before having it coded for my HTML messages.If you created your text copy in Word or other formatted word-processing programs, paste it into Notepad or other plain-text programs and check it again, or read it backwards to take the words out of context. This can make misspellings pop. Don't rely on your spell-checker to catch usage errors (to-two-too, your-you're, there-their).
3. I verified that the offer or other purpose for sending the message is the correct one.Always check first by clicking through on your test messages and verify your destination is correct. A wrong URL or page not found error can destroy an email campaign.
4. I included an unsubscribe link and street address as required by CAN-SPAM. (Or, I included all the elements my country's commercial-email regulations require.)For U.S. email senders, the law specifically requires adding an unsubscribe link and your company postal address. If you have redesigned your template or switched to a new one, you should double-check to make sure these crucial elements are still there and easy to find.
5. These identifying elements are present and accounted for:
The subject line is filled in with text that accurately represents the email message content.
The "from" line shows my company or brand name, not an email address. You want the mail to stand as a reliable presence in the inbox.
Any dates, especially copyright, reflect the correct year. This is important, especially if you work far ahead and often overlooked in January when the year changes. Having the wrong date makes you look amateurish, and amateurish mistakes look spammy.
My company contact information, including name, street address, telephone numbers, Web site and email address for questions or concerns. If you want your customers to feel more confident about interacting with you, give them many ways to contact you.
6. I clicked every link and link-connected image to make sure they all work, and checked to make sure each image has an alt tag describing the content.This is a simple troubleshooter, but it seems to get overlooked frequently, judging from all the broken links we see. Broken links mean recipients can't act on your email even if they wanted to and actually makes your entire message useless.
The alt tag is important because it gives you another way to deliver information when your readers have disabled images. The alt tag can either describe the image or house a call to action.
7. I previewed the message in my preview pane and with images disabled, in different browsers and on different computer platforms.Your list software should allow you to test-send your message before launching it to your list. Do this every time, even if you're sending a message using a template that has been thoroughly debugged. Read it on different platforms – PC, Mac, mobile – and in different browsers, mainly Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari (for Mac users), with the preview pane enabled and images disabled. Now you see your email as your subscribers do. If it isn't pretty, go back to the drawing board.
8. I proofread my text message and included the link to my message on the Web.Repeat Step 2 with the copy in your text message (not formatted in HTML or using pictures or other images). The text message has re-emerged in importance for mobile readers whose devices don't read HTML. Also make sure the Web link is present and working for mobile readers who can decode HTML or for subscribers whose alternative or nonstandard browsers don't render HTML well.
9. I had one other person look it over before I hit "send."Here you ask someone who was not involved in creating the message to give it a once-over before a launch. You want a fresh pair of eyes and a brain that hasn't looked at the same mistake 10 times without seeing it.
10. I tested my body copy and HTML coding with a delivery monitoring tool to make sure it doesn't trigger spam filters.You should always ask someone to look over your message before you send it, but a fresh pair of eyes doesn't always know what will trigger an ISP or email-server's spam filters. A third-party delivery monitoring service, such as Email Advisor, stays tuned to the most up-to-date filter quirks can reveal potential problems before you commit yourself.
A service like this can spot filter triggers in content or formatting, show you whether your email is more likely to get blocked outright, to get filtered to the junk file or be delivered straight to the inbox or check to see if you landed on a blacklist.
SOURCEhttp://www.lyrishq.com/content/view/174/