The Complete Email Marketing Checklist for Successful Campaigns

Email marketing continues to be a wildly effective channel—for every $1 spent, brands see an average of $36 in ROI!

As with any average, that means some brands get a much higher return, while others fall below the mathematical mean.

To land your brand on the upside of the curve, you’ll want to create emails that follow all best practices. Let’s walk through the steps that lead to a high-performance marketing email. We’ve put them in a convenient email marketing checklist you can refer to for every campaign.

Contents

• Set your goal
• Define your KPIs
• Identify your audience
• Draft your key copy elements
• Add personalization
• Make smart design choices
• Send test emails
• Schedule your send
• Measure email marketing metrics
• Make tweaks based on results

Email marketing checklist: 10 steps to take in every campaign

Use these steps to plan, create, send, and optimize a sales-driving email marketing campaign.

1. Set your goal

Every marketing piece you put out should have a specific objective, and your emails are no exception.

Before considering the email subject line or layout, ask yourself this question: What do we want to achieve by sending this email?

The answer doesn’t have to be complicated. For example, if you’re hosting an upcoming webinar to serve as a lead generation tool, you can send an email with the goal of driving registrations for the event.

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2. Define your KPIs

Once you’ve set your goal, how will you measure it?

Key performance indicators, or KPIs, help you evaluate the success of your email campaign. Adding them is the next step in our email marketing checklist.

Continuing with the webinar example, one way to track effectiveness is to compare the email click-through rate with the resulting webinar registrations. If many people click the “Register Now” call to action (CTA) in the email, but very few actually complete the registration form, that’s a sign that there might be something wrong with the landing page or form itself.

If your click-through rate is high but your conversions are low, make sure your landing page is aligned with your email message.

Alternatively, if the click-through rate on the CTA button is low, consider readjusting your email copy on the next send. Perhaps you need to tout the speaker’s credentials, or maybe your audience needs to hear three concrete benefits they’ll get from attending. Either change could help readers understand the webinar’s value and drive more click-throughs.

3. Identify your audience

The next step is to identify and segment your target audience.

Ideally, you already have segmented lists within your email marketing platform. Breaking your mailing list down into different categories can help you send only the most relevant messages to each person.

Consider segmenting your audience based on these categories.

To continue with the webinar example, the event is designed to help generate leads, so you don’t need to send the invitation to existing clients. Instead, you might send it to anyone on your prospect list and past clients you’re hoping to win back.

4. Draft your key copy elements

Now that you know exactly what your email is intending to do and who your recipients are, you can draft your key copy elements. They include:

• Email subject line: Keep these short (between 30 and 50 characters) and add eye-catching action words and an emoji or two to drive clicks.
• Preview text: This is the additional text that shows in an inbox before someone opens an email. It can add context to your subject line; limit it to 100 characters or fewer.
• Call to action: Once they’ve clicked, your call to action invites readers to take a concrete next step with your brand. In the case of the webinar example, the CTA might be “Register today” or “Save my spot.”

The subject line and preview text in these emails work together to provide readers with the information they need to feel inspired to click.

Depending on the size of your email list, you might consider A/B testing some of this copy. Many email marketing tools allow you to send one subject line to half your recipients and a second subject line to the other half. A difference in performance can help you identify what messaging works (and what doesn’t). The larger your email list, the bigger your sample size, and the more informative any A/B data will be.

🤝 A great subject line will boost open rates. Get Email Subject Lines for Every Month of the Year (+Tips & Examples)

5. Add personalization

Personalized emails have a 29% higher open rate and a 41% higher click-through rate when compared to their non-personalized counterparts.

You can use automation and merge tags to personalize your emails at scale. For example, include a {{first name}} merge tag in the email subject line or greeting to auto-populate each email with your contact’s name. Of course, for this to work, you’ll need a clean email list that contains the correct information for each of your recipients.

You can also personalize the email on your end. Consider changing the following to suit each email you send:

• Sender email address: Make your email appear like it’s coming from an individual, and adjust the sender to match the email content. For example, that webinar invite might come from the event host, while a new product announcement might come from your CEO.
• Sender display name: This is the “From” name that appears in recipients’ inboxes. Make it friendly, and add a signifier that makes it obvious it’s coming from your business—for example, “Jeff from [Your Business Name].”
• Reply-to name: If you want people to engage with and respond to your email, ensure you’re not using a “donotreply@yourcompany” email address.

Rather than coming from the general company inbox, the sender’s display name on this email is the webinar host.

6. Make smart design choices

After words come design and layout. As you get your message formatted in your email marketing tool, ensure you’re hitting these marks.

• Use the right image file type: Bulky images take up a lot of space and can affect deliverability; JPGs and GIFs are more compact than PNGs or APNGs.
• Add alt text to all your images: Not only is this vital for accessibility, but it also allows you to include explanatory text in your email, in case your images are blocked by the recipient’s email client.
• Check the plain text version of your email: Even your HTML emails need a plain text version. Ensure that it looks good and is formatted properly.
• Verify that the total size of your email is under 102 KB: Anything larger is at risk of clipping for recipients who use Gmail.

7. Send test emails

Even if everything looks nice in preview mode on your email marketing tool, send test emails to ensure they arrive in a real inbox in the same state.

These are the items to watch for in the test email.

• Are merge tags displaying correctly? (E.g., “Hi {{first name}}” becomes, “Hi Maggie.”)
• Do you have a backup for dynamic content, and is it displaying properly? (E.g., if you don’t have a first name for someone in your system, does the personalization show up as, “Hi {{first name}}”, or does it revert to something like, “Hi friend.”)
• Is all spelling and grammar correct? Double-check any text within images, too!
• Do images display correctly?

Even in dark mode, this image looks good!

• Are images legible in dark mode? Images with a transparent background and dark text can be near-impossible to read in dark mode.
• Do all links work? Do links function the way they’re supposed to, drive where they’re supposed to, and include relevant tracking?
• Is the email load time short? Ideally, it shouldn’t take more than a couple of seconds for content to appear.
• Does the email meet legal requirements? Spam laws in the US dictate that all emails must have:
  • Full business contact info, including a mailing address
  • A clear opt-out/unsubscribe button

8. Schedule your send

You did it! Your email is drafted, designed, and double-checked. Now, you just have to hit send.

The question is, when should you send your emails? It does matter. Ideally, you want them to show up when people are checking and be relevant to what they’re thinking about—a promotion for beach sandals might work better on Thursday than on Monday.  We’ve laid out some ways to find the best time to send your emails here.

If you prefer to schedule it rather than send it immediately, ensure you get the date and time correct (double-check the time zone).

9. Measure email marketing metrics

Now, the fun part, where you get to see the fruits of your labor. Periodically review the KPIs you established earlier. You can do this either through your email service provider or with a third-party email automation tool that has an analytics dashboard.

Make sure the results are on par with your goals by regularly checking the email marketing metrics. 

The key here is to stay focused. There are many metrics you can follow. However, you selected a few that aligned with your overall business goals during the planning stages. Keep those as your main measures of success so you don’t get distracted.

10. Make tweaks based on results

Successful marketing is about constant improvement. With every iteration, you learn something new about your audience, marketing platforms, or messaging you can use in the next iteration.

And that’s the final step of our email marketing checklist. Every time you review your regular metrics or the results from an A/B test, make note of what moved the needle forward and what failed to perform.

For example, suppose you learned that subject lines containing powerful action verbs result in a higher open rate. And in the next campaign, you learned that images of people elicited a higher click-through rate. You can combine those two insights to boost future campaigns even more.

Email marketing checklist: do this before scheduling your send

We know that’s a lot of ground to cover for each email. But as you get used to the process, you’ll be able to zip through the checklist.

And it’s worth it. Taking the time to craft the most effective email possible gives your campaign its greatest chance of success (and try these AI email techniques, too).

Worried you’ll forget a step along the way? Here’s a recap of the list to keep you on track!

• Set email goal
• Define KPIs
• Identify audience
• Draft key copy elements
  • Subject line
  • Preview text
  • CTA
  • Optional: A/B testing
• Add personalization
  • Merge tags
  • Sender email address
  • Sender display name
  • Reply-to name
• Check these design elements
  • Select compact image files (JPG/GIF)
  • Add alt tags to all images
  • Review the plain-text version
  • Verify your email is <102KB
• Send a test email. Check that:
  • Merge tags display correctly
  • Spelling and grammar are correct (including within images)
  • Images are correct
  • Images are legible in dark mode
  • All links function
  • Load time <2-3 seconds
  • Opt-out options show
• Schedule your send, and double-check the date and time

Meet The Author

Amanda Rodhe

Amanda Rodhe is a freelance content marketing writer. She’s passionate about the power of the written word and loves helping brands craft compelling stories that stick. You can connect with her on LinkedIn or learn more at www.amandarodhe.com.

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