What Is QA for Email Marketing & 5 Tips for Spotless Emails

It's simple: if your emails are full of typos, low-quality images, and incorrect links, your potential customers are not going to take you seriously. This will have a negative impact both on your seller reputation and, ultimately, your business and revenue. This is where QA steps in by making sure your emails are well-written, impactful, and reassuring to your audience.

Still, email QA is more than just fixing typos and formatting text. It will help you reconsider decisions about the placement, design, and content of your calls-to-action, re-think the imagery you are using, as well as check if your tone of voice is appropriate for the audience you are targeting.

For one, QA can help improve your emails drastically and assure you that everything is just right! Properly formatted emails speaking to the right people can help you build a positive image and credibility.

When potential customers receive an email that is nicely put together and optimized to their needs, they are going to perceive you as professional and trustworthy. Therefore, they will be more likely to purchase from you and keep looking forward to your future offers.

It looks like QA is more important than one may think, doesn't it? For that reason, we are going to provide you with 5 key tips for making your emails stand out in the eyes of your audience.

One of the best things you can do is to personalize your emails as much as possible. Throughout the process of composing an email, you should keep in mind exactly who your audience is, both generally, and in that particular case. Approach the email from your audience's point of view, and pay close attention to what they would most likely want to hear about and be interested in.

Another thing to consider is the impression your emails leave on your customers. Do they encourage your audience to get engaged? Are they overly ambitious and overflowing with CTAs and product offers? Having too many things to click on can sometimes be as bad as having too few. We can help you with finding the middle ground - awake interest of your audience without being overbearing.

This is a crucial part of QA because an email's quality is equal to its relevance and moderation of expression. You should keep your audience in mind while creating an email; however, it's not too late to make improvements once the email is composed, but not yet sent.

We all know that first impressions always matter, but when it comes to your emails, they are of huge importance.

The subject line and the preheader (preview text) are your audience's very first contact with your email, and can often make or break your campaign. These two components are visible in the inbox, even before a recipient opens the email, and they naturally have the task of being attention-grabbing enough to entice the recipient to engage with the email by opening it.

This is why you should pay special attention to your subject lines and preheaders. Take a look at them and think about the following:

Are they eye-catching enough?

A quick and easy way to make your subject lines stand out in any inbox are emojis. You can use different emojis to communicate all kinds of messages, just don't overdo it! Take a look at how emojis can help your email performance in our blog post here.

Do they arise interest in the content of the email?

Apart from using emojis, you can get the audience's attention by hinting at an exclusive offer inside the email. This is a great way to increase your open rates if you have an offer included. Who doesn't like a discount or free shipping?

Humor can also help because it shows that there's a human touch behind just another email in the inbox. This makes it easier for your audience to connect with your company and its values.

Do they contain any grammar mistakes or typos?

Mistakes in the subject line and the preheader can have a very negative impact on your email's performance. They can lead your audience to see you as unprofessional, careless, and unreliable, which is the last thing any serious email marketer wants. The process of QA requires you to focus on this intensively and to make sure that your audience's first impression of you is the best possible one. It ensures that your emails are always welcome in your recipients' inboxes.

Make sure your copy is brief and to the point. It should clearly state what the email is about and present the recipient with a clear call-to-action (CTA). If your copy goes on and on about whatever it is you're presenting in the email, your recipients are going to lose interest halfway through – or worse, as soon as they open the email and see a wall of text.

Same goes for CTAs – it's important not to overdo it. You want to encourage your recipients to take action and engage, but if your email is overflowing with the 'BUY NOW' and 'GET IT HERE' buttons and links, it's going to have the opposite effect.

Too many CTAs can put a potential customer off, so you should aim to find the perfect balance.

This is a crucial part of the QA process, where the main aim is to produce high-quality emails which establish a friendly relationship with recipients, but also encourage them to engage further once they've already opened the email.

Another thing to keep in mind with your copy is how well it represents your brand. You want your email to reflect the goals and attitudes of your company. Think about what your values are and integrate them into your emails, and along with that, into the relationship with your audience. This, of course, means that your copy is error-free and consistent. Mistakes and inconsistencies (such as typos, wrong punctuation, missing words, grammar mistakes, etc.) can make you look amateurish and careless. Being mindful of this when you're going through the QA process for your emails can really make your emails shine and leave a lasting positive effect on your audience.

While some people prefer text-only marketing emails, relevant and eye-catching images can certainly intrigue your audience and familiarize them with your products or services. The main image of the email should, of course, be the hero image. This is most likely the first thing that stands out to your recipients, so use it to your advantage – present your products concisely and accurately, and get the recipient's attention.

It's a good idea to include images of your product in use. By showing people engaging with the product, you are more likely to get your audience to see what they could get from the product and how it would fit into their lives. This could potentially convince those indecisive customers who need a bit of final encouragement to go ahead and purchase the product or engage with your website.

Make sure your images are always clear and high-quality. Grainy or pixelated images are probably going to put some people off, as they reflect a lack of professionalism and care.

Remember: high-quality emails contain high-quality content!

Still, you should keep your images relatively small and be moderate when using them. Having too many images in an email or featuring images that are too large can land you in the spam folder.

As mentioned before, although you want to encourage your potential customers to take action, you don't want to overwhelm them with too many CTAs in your emails, as they can lead to the conclusion that you only care about profit and not about building lasting relationships with your subscribers. Images can help you resolve this problem easily! You should hyperlink your images because by doing that, you give the audience more points-of-access to your website without being annoying or overbearing.

So, you've applied every tip above and your email looks good on your desktop. At this point, it's easy to forget to make the final but crucial step – optimize the email for mobile devices. It's absolutely necessary you do so because the number of people who check their inbox on mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones keeps increasing. All serious email marketers should keep that in mind.

Optimizing emails for mobile devices means adjusting many components of the email, such as the subject line, preheader, navigation bar, content, etc. Make your subject lines and preheaders short enough so they can be clearly visible in a mobile device inbox. Hide your navigation bar if you have one, as it can take a lot of valuable space and clutter the recipient's small screen. Adjust the images so that they look good on mobile, and make sure that any text in those images is legible.

These are just some pieces of advice on improving your emails' appearance on mobile devices. Keep your emails clean, clutter-free, and optimized with our tips on creating mobile-friendly emails. And make sure to check our essential guide on email mobile optimization.

Once your email is personalized and straightforward in its intention, leaves a good first impression in the inbox, features adequate images, and looks good on mobile devices, you're ready to send with confidence! The process of email QA reassures you that your audience will enjoy the experience of engaging with the email and will have you reaping the benefits of hard work.

Good luck!

Three email QA checkpoints for Essence of Email client emails.

Yes, you read that right. All marketing emails we send on behalf of our clients go through three quality assurance checkpoints before sending. That's how we deliver spotless campaigns for brands that trust us.

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