Review the concept of your next email
In our agency, email campaigns pass through QA at every stage of production. We use the “four eyes” principle to check the email’s quality at specification, design, coding and platform stages.
What I find interesting, and was unexpected for me at first, is that at the specification stage sometimes you can find mistakes without even looking at the email. Let me explain.
The very first doc that our email marketer prepares when building an email is a prototype doc. It’s a Google Doc with two parts:
- the email concept,
- the email body prototype.
The second part, the email body prototype, is exactly what you would expect it to be: text-based copy and layout of the email body, something the designer will later turn into a beautiful on-brand Figma design.
The email concept, on the other hand, is a list of answers a to high-level questions about the campaign or flow:
- What is the target audience? Where are they in the customer journey?
- When, or under what circumstances, are we sending it?
- CTA: what do we want the recipient to do after reading the email?
- What is the main idea of the email, the one-line takeaway? How does it motivate the CTA?
- What kind of promo (discount, sale) are we using to support the CTA?
Here’s the insight: sometimes you can see a mistake by just looking at the email concept. Since it is the first page or the prototype doc, this literally means that you haven’t yet looked at the copy.
Some of the typical mistakes are:
- stuffing too many ideas into one email,
- selling too early: using the “Buy” CTA on a complex product or service that the customer likely doesn’t understand yet,
- mismatched main idea and CTA
We’ve been following this process since 2019, so by now every email marketer on the team has the skill of critically reviewing the email concept down to a reflex. This prevents many mistakes and saves resources.
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Review the concept of your next email
In our agency, email campaigns pass through QA at every stage of production. We use the “four eyes” principle to check the email’s quality at specification, design, coding and platform stages.