Email – Deployment Checklist

Email Content Design

• Design your content around a clear call to action, and make sure it aligns with the general purpose of the email.
• Make sure the email design adheres to your company’s brand guidelines.
• Make sure all images/headlines/buttons are linked.
• Assign all images relevant alt text. This description will describe the image for those with visual disabilities, images turned off, and search engines.
• Check your HTML for errors with a validator, like the W3C HTML validator.
• Test your content templates on many desktop, web, and mobile email clients to make sure it renders well. Omail has partnered with Litmus for their rendering tool – contact the Omail team for details on this additional service.
• If sending a text version make sure the spacing is correct. This is especially important if you used the “generate Text from HTML” feature.
• If using personalizations, double check that you have default values set in case there are any recipients with blank values on your audience file.
• Check that all URLs are prepended with http:// or https:// and that there are no extra spaces between the “” for those URLs in your code.

Email Copy

• Spell check and proof read both the subject line and the body content.
• Make sure that copy, and dates, times, and content make sense in relation to the scheduled email deployment.
• Add a relevant pre-header above your body content.
• Verify complete physical mailing address is visible.

CAN-Spam Requirements

• Verify unsubscribe link is included and working. We suggest using the “Confirm Unsubscribe” page merge variable as opposed to the 1 click Unsubscribe page merge variable.
• The subject line must be indicative of the content; it cannot be misleading in order to encourage more opens.

GDPR

• For more information, visit Omeda’s GDPR Overview

Audience Selection

• Make sure all known invalid email addresses were excluded from your audience list. In OnQ the selection would be Invalid Email = blank, or if using the ‘exclude’ parameter then Invalid Email = Yes
• Make sure only customers with Email Addresses were included in your audience list, and that you were selecting the correct email address for those customers (See Contact Rules in OnQ). In OnQ the selection would be Email Address Present/Not Present = Present.
• If you are getting your audience from OnQ, make sure to exclude the deployment types Opt Outs so your count is accurate before you output to Omail.
• Make sure to apply any applicable email & domain suppression files.
• Double check that the correct and most recent audience list has been selected.

Deployment Setup

• Set the from and mailbox names, make sure they are consistent with past deployments of the same type.
• If Omeda does not handle your customer service, set a ‘reply to’ email address so you receive any replies.
• Check through your list of testers and seeds to make sure it is accurate.
• Verify that open and link tracking are turned on in the tracking pleat.
• If you are using olytics, make sure that setting is enabled in the tracking pleat.
• If you are using web tracking string, check that Web Tracking is turned on and the correct configuration is selected.

Testing

• Test all links to make sure they load to the correct pages.
• Double check that all merge variables/default values are populating correctly.
• Make sure any special characters (Unicode characters) render correctly in all major email clients. If any characters come up as errors, you can replace them with the appropriate HTML code listed on this website.
• Before approving and scheduling deployment confirm that you have received all necessary approvals.