You know what hurts? Spending roughly three weeks (or more) shepherding an email from ideation to deployment … only to realize later that an error made it all the way through to your customers’ inboxes. Waiting until after approvals are finished to manually type in a variant subject line exponentially increases your risk of failure. But many times it’s not just a contextual spelling or grammatical mistake that makes it through. Sometimes it’s the UX of a landing page, a broken link, or even just a backend issue. Aggressively integrate proofreading into your workflow. This is number one for a reason. It’s your first, middle, and last line of defense. Make sure you use both your product and a human copy editor to be doubly sure nothing slips through. Create efficient and actionable customer feedback loops. After you send, keep your eyes and ears out for qualitative feedback. These days, it’s fairly easy to set up a loop via Slack (or Hipchat, etc.) that makes real-time user feedback actionable for your organization. Scenario : Deploy Emails > User Engages > User Provides Comments (positive or negative) How we solve it: Our social media team helps us monitor company mentions and comments on Twitter for several hours after a large campaign goes live. The biggest piece of advice here is to look for feedback and the heartbeat of every single large send. This feedback may not affect your team directly, but by tracking it and relaying it to appropriate teams, you’ll increase your value — and that should do wonders to strengthen the company perception of the email team. You’ll also learn about phrases that may not resonate with your audience so that you can refine your style over time. Choose a cadence for revisiting and auditing automated emails. This one’s short and sweet: Don’t set it and forget it. Revisit your life cycle creative like it’s your core product. Shoot to revisit your life cycle at a cadence that makes sense and use a good decision framework for business impact and UX. At minimum, don’t go longer than a year without revisiting live creative. Review samples thoroughly for dynamic emails. Another short one: If you’re sending out personalized emails with a lot of dynamic content, then make sure you preview multiple variations ahead of a deployment. Don’t let a robot do all the writing. There are a lot of cool third-party technologies in the email world today. And while we’ve seen our fair share of demos, we try not to rely too much on automation for copywriting. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t perform meaningful experiments to identify new ways to optimize your email copy. But allowing machine learning to take the wheel entirely could jeopardize the quality and consistency of your email strategy. After all, these automated tools usually optimize individual email campaigns, but aren’t able to think about the entire customer journey.