Email works. But it’s hard work to make it right, to keep the quality high. Organizations like yours take two or more weeks to get one email out the door. Contributing to that time being eaten up is all you must go through to make that email – let’s just say it – perfect.
If you’re fortunate enough for subscribers to click open one of your marketing emails, all the effort to build and deploy it will be for naught if your email quality isn’t first-rate. Here are just some of what the subscriber experiences:
- Slow loading
- Improper/incomplete rendering
- Awkward typos
- Broken images
- Links that don’t link
- Accessibility and deliverability issues
- Incorrect footer
- Out-of-date regulatory information
Quality isn’t just about the email. It also involves the quality of your operations. Have you ever lived through the unintended send or other “oops moments” like that? You are living dangerously if anyone in your organization can create, upload, and deploy an email. You should never underestimate the value of permissioning.
The unfortunate reality is if you can imagine it, something that negatively impacts your email and, by extension, the perception of your brand will happen.
Better process = better quality
Your email creation process is the primary culprit for bad things happening to good email marketers. There are too many places to list where your email quality degradation occurs.
It’s a process that involves many specialists using single-purpose tools operating in silos. Collaboration tends to be poor, producing less than stellar creative product.
Then there’s a time-sucking review & approval process that prevents fine-tuning, strategically or creatively. Further, it’s too common that the wrong version of an email proof is “fully approved” when, in fact, it’s not. A key factor in this is the dizzying amount of back-and-forth of proofs, comments, and more proofs moving asynchronously to all who must okay the email before it is sent.
A critical aspect of email quality is how it looks. Companies work to nurture relationships with customers or consumers via email.
If the font, color palette, and look & feel vary from email to email, you’re creating a problem for the recipient. It confuses them about what you’re about and what your product or service can do for them.
Keep it up; there’s an excellent chance they’ll lose trust in your brand and eventually end the relationship.
To learn more, download the eBook The economics of email creation [Link to come]
