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Email phobia and preventing

THE FEARBecs Rivett

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Who am I?

• Worked with emails for 6 years

• Freelance email marketer

• Email campaign manager for Yorkshire

Building Society

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I’m going to cover

• Why we need a signoff process

• Preparing for success

• Testing and signoff

• What happens post-send

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Why do we need a

signoff process?

• Getting buy in from your key stakeholders

• Setting expectations for deadlines and

signoff

• Ensuring someone else can do the job

• Preventing the fear

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What is email phobia?

The crippling fear.

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What is email phobia?

The crippling fear that can only come from

sending hundreds of thousands of people an

email with a broken link or a typo in the subject

line and not being able to fix it no matter how

much you Google “change email after sent”.

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Like this…

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I remember once

sending an email to

myself 25,000 times.@danbarker

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I sent the wrong

email to about 3500

on my second week

in a job... Doh.@maxray

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I've had a few where I've

immediately paused a

send after hitting the

button, just to triple check

things.@iamacyborg

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Rushing = mistakes

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Be prepared…

with a schedule

• Plan around seasons, sale,

peaks and troughs

• It’s not set in stone, be

prepared to update it

• Bank content ideas

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Work out who’s

involved…

• Talk to your team!

• Do they know their role?

• Set some dates and deadlines

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That designer/developer

relationship

• Will it blend build?

• Don’t promise what you can’t deliver…

• If in doubt, test it out!

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Don’t wait until just

before the send

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Test that email!

• Try some live results, especially for mobile

• Run your code through a validator

• Check some live customer versions too -

especially with variations!

• Two pairs of eyes are better than one!

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Test that email!

• Chek yor splling

• Check the links

• Look at your subject line

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Get the email signed off

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Get the email signed off

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Oh. And save the signoffs

(You never know

when you’ll

need them)

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Can you just change

that…?

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Ch-ch-ch-changes

• Try to reduce last minute changes - your

campaign checklist will help!

• If changes are made

• Run through your tests again

• Think about how you can prevent this in

future

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Regular reporting

• Create a consistent reporting schedule

• I use 24 hour and 7 day results

• If you work with a team, show them your

findings

• Remember, one swallow doesn’t make a

summer

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Post-send actions

• Review your results, but not just the stats

• Feed them back into the process

• Tidy up your files, store them together

• Have a sensible naming system!

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Rinse and repeat

• Don’t re-code what you don’t need to

• Build yourself an asset library

• Email templates

• Code snippets

• Basic images like spacers and logos

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Versioning

• Saves time and helps locate issues and old

copy

• Old school: newsletter-v1.html, newsletter-

v2.html

• New school: Using GIT

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Incremental

improvements

• Sign up to lots of different emails

• Save copies of your favourites

• Take tips from the experts

• Anna Yeaman (Style Campaign) often

shares testing results

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To summarise• Create a campaign schedule

• Make an asset library

• Create a signoff checklist

• Test your emails and get someone else to do

it too

• Create a consistent reporting schedule

• Remember...

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You’re not a robot

Source: Design Bern

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Tak for listening!