• by Chad White , February 2, 2010

As an industry, we can learn a lot from the mistakes of our peers. That's the spirit in which I publish the Oopsy Hall of Fame each year. This year's inductees demonstrated several weak points in our collective email processes: 

Subject lines aren't making the best impressions. While there are thankfully few catastrophic subject line errors -- like Harry & David's "Postcard Optin" subject line -- there were plenty of subject lines with missing words, missing hyphenation and misused apostrophes. According to a 2007 Forrester Research study, 35% of subscribers open an email because of what's in the subject line, so making sure that yours is error-free is critical.  

Considering the problems that retailers had with their subject lines, I was delightfully surprised to see that they had fairly clean preheader messages, especially considering that the concept is still relatively new. Perhaps the newness made marketers pay more attention to this email element, resulting in fewer mistakes. 

Duplicate emails are too common. More than 12% of the retailers I track sent the same email two or more times in rapid succession. These are either deployment issues on the part of their email service provider, or problems eliminating overlap between two or more lists that are being mailed to. Considering how high email volumes are already, accidentally sending duplicates on an email may just be the final straw that compels a straying subscriber to opt out -- or mark you as spam and be done.

Misaligned and missing images were the scourge of email oopsies during 2009. Tons of emails had gaps between images -- and the more images that were used to build the email, the more Frankenstein-ish the emails became. Presumably, many of the issues could have been avoided through better coding, such as adding "display:block" to the style tag in the image coding. 

Missing images were also quite common. Whether because of image path coding problems or image server issues, missing images can blow holes in your beautiful email design.

 But what this really tells me is that marketers aren't previewing their emails across the major email clients -- either by setting up test accounts or by using a rendering tool. Considering the wide discrepancies in coding support across email clients and how support changes, often without notice, testing the rendering of your emails often -- if not for every send -- is vital.

 You can dramatically reduce the likelihood of making email oopsies by doing four things: 
1. Use spell-check.
2. Have someone else look over the emails you create.
3. Check the rendering of your emails in all the major email clients.
4. Create a preflight checklist so you can be sure you're sending the right email to the right list at the right time.

I hope these tips help you have a more error-free 2010.

P.S. One area to keep your eye on is the rendering of dynamic content. Inserting dynamic individual discount codes in text can be particularly troublesome. Make sure that the text color and background color work with each other as well as the overall design.