What you should do Right Now – Thursday Mini-Audit

… if your company runs any sort of email marketing, anyway.
Right now is the best time to do a mini-audit of your mail campaign. It’ll just take ten minutes, and if you put off doing it until tomorrow it’ll probably never get done.

1. Go to your public-facing company home page. Does it have a link to your privacy policy? Does it have a link to where you can sign up for mailing lists? Is there a strong call to action to sign up or just an option if people are looking to do so? Is that the right approach for your audience?
2. Go to the web page where members of the public can sign up for your lists. Yes, even if you’re already subscribed to it, lets do it again. Does it use company branding? Does it look tempting? Does it give an honest summary of what mail you’ll receive (content, frequency)? Does it link to your privacy policy? Does it tell subscribers the email address the mail will come from and encourage them to add it to their address books?
3. Sign up. Create a brand new account with a hard to guess address at gmail or yahoo or your favorite freemail provider, sign that up and use it for nothing else. If you have access to tagged addresses, they can be more convenient, but in some ways using a freemail provider is a better test.
4. Do you get a welcome email or opt-in confirmation almost immediately? A minute is great. More than five minutes might be a problem. Does it go to the bulk folder?
5. Does the welcome email describe the sort of mail you’ll be getting, provide links back to your main web site and reiterate the “add foo@example.com to your address book” advice? Does it use consistent company branding? If you know how to view it in plain text, do that and see if it’s still well designed.
6. Reply to the welcome email with a question – does it bounce? Does anyone ever reply?
7. Add entries in your calendar to come back here for part 2 on Thursday 22nd July, part 3 on Thursday August 12th and part 4 on Thursday October 7th.