Sending mailshots
Assembling the Pieces
The sending of a mailshot is just the tip of an iceberg of preparation. Before you can send, all your template designs, artwork, photography, email accounts, link targets and mailing list have to be tested and ready to roll.
Once all those things are in place, the actual send is quite simple!
Pre-Send Check List
- Mailing list ready
- From address / name decided
- Subject line chosen
- Email authentication set up
- Email template loaded
- Account Branding Set Up
Sending
Once you’re happy with your tests:
- Choose your send time (or just ‘now’).
- Name the mailshot.
- Pick a campaign folder to store it in.
- Send the mailshot.
Testing Emails
We simply can’t stress enough how important testing your mailshots is!
When sending mailshots, there is no ‘undo’ – what’s set at send-time is what’s sent. Our servers are tuned for high-performance delivery – so a 50,000 recipient mailshot will go out in a matter of seconds, and once it’s gone, it’s gone.
The majority of errors occur in the template, so we provide tools to help you get it right – we provide HTML validation, link checking, image checking, spam filter testing and our own simple sanity checker in the template editor, and we strongly recommend that you make use of them.
Some designers see validation as some kind of threat, but there is never any reason to have mismatched, misnested or invalid HTML syntax; it’s just wrong.
Our suggested workflow is that you create a test list and send your initial tests to that, then when you’re happy with that copy it and change only the mailing list to which it is sent (and perhaps the mailshot title and campaign folder) before scheduling for a send. If you make any changes to your template, always send another test.
In case you missed that; ALWAYS RETEST! A template can be completely ruined by the simple omission or addition of a single charater – both of which would probably be caught by a validation check.