Your List Email Pre-Send Checklist

Scheduling any email, especially when deploying to large audiences can be an intimidating experience. With any human-based set up, there can always be mistakes, but there are ways to try and limit them.

One of the things you can do is use a pre-send checklist, which you can refer to each time you send a list email from Pardot.

The Checklist

	Content Read through the content of your email and ensure it meets your objectives. Get someone else to proof read it for you. At this point, you should also check that your dynamic content conditions are set up correctly.
	Rendering Make sure your emails display correctly across devices. Pardot has a built in email rendering tool called Litmus, which will show you how your email will display across multiple devices on both mobile and desktop. You can find this in the testing tab of your email under the ‘Rendering’ section.
	Testing Create an email testing list so you can send yourself a test of the email, enabling you to check all of the links in the email. You can do this by opening the ‘Marketing’ menu, selecting ‘Segmentation’ then ‘Lists’. Create a new list, then tick the box ‘Email Test List’, and add yourself to the list.
	Subject line Check that you have added a subject line, and that it is relevant to the content of your email. If you have added personalisation to your subject line, check that it is pulling through the correct information.
	Preview text Make sure you have added preview text and that it is relevant to the content of your email. (If you can’t see where to do this, make sure your email template is using the pardot-region=”Preheader” tag).
	Plain text When an email client can’t read an HTML email it will default back to ‘plain text’ (lines of basic text with no imagery and full links exposed). In Pardot, you can find this in the ‘text’ area of your email template set up. Pardot allows you to sync the plain text with the existing HTML. You can format this so it looks tidier.
	Audience Choose who should receive your email. Will the recipient find the email content relevant, useful and interesting? Make sure to segment the data properly in Pardot… and use best practice naming conventions when creating your lists.
	Date and time  When do you want your recipients to read and interact with your email? Use data from previous successes. Does your message have a specific time frame? Would you rather it was sent on a business day?

If this is your first time sending a list email from Pardot, you can check out first timer checklist here.