Overview

A formal email campaign QA process is critical for achieving your team’s campaign production goals. It allows your marketing team to maintain the trust of both your internal organization and marketing database recipients, and ensure their activities support their brand reputation and drive revenue.

What is campaign QA?

Campaign QA is a step-by-step process designed to ensure all of its components are free of error, executed efficiently, and delivered in the designated time frame set within your campaign planning. It is typically done in several phases, starting with the creator of the campaign (i.e. “the build specialist”) and ending with selected reviewers (i.e. “the QA specialist(s)”) performing the QA. The timeframe in which the QA is completed should be allocated within the overarching designated service level agreement (SLA) of each campaign type. Lastly, the QA process is not meant to be a review of email design and/or copy changes and should solely focus on reviewing the components specifically identified in the checklist.

Why should companies do QA?

Simply put, a campaign with multiple errors can erode trust with your current and prospective customers, leading to a higher likelihood of issues at both the micro and macro levels of your marketing and sales process. It can also erode trust within your campaign management process, resulting in precious marketing dollars wasted and process change at the personnel level. The QA step is arguably the most important step of your campaign production process and usually requires service-level buy-in from all members of your marketing team.

When should a company do QA?

QA should always be performed upon the completion of the build phase of the campaign. Email campaigns of all sizes and priorities deserve the necessary QA steps taken to ensure optimal excellence of all campaign components. Just like re-reading an important email before sending it to an internal list of colleagues, every marketing email should be formally vetted and reviewed by a QA process before sending it to potentially thousands of people in your marketing database.

How should a company do QA?

We recommend putting together a formalized checklist with a designated review of each campaign component that can be used during the QA process. Preferably, the checklist should be designed in a way so that the build specialist and the QA specialist(s) cannot skip each review step in case they are limited on time. This can be done via form submission, a checklist within a project management tool, or even a Google document, ensuring full transparency of QA completion by the assigned reviewers. Every campaign build should have a designated QA piece of documentation to be kept as part of the audit trail in case of any campaign error.

Who should do QA at their company?

The QA process will require participation from the assigned build specialist of the campaign and at least one other QA specialist close to the campaign from the campaign planning phase. The QA specialist should have no participation in the build phase to ensure a fresh set of eyes. The QA specialist should also be familiar with the build process to provide any QA feedback so that the build specialist can make edits within a timely manner.

Conclusion

In conclusion, a formalized email QA process is one of the most essential steps of the campaign production process and should be reinforced by all marketing team members. Reduced email campaign mistakes will lead to increased trust in and outside your organization, not to mention, increased ROI and potential revenue from your campaigns. In communicating your formalized QA process, your team will have a better understanding of all the steps that are involved to create a simple email campaign, leading them to give QA the thought and attention it deserves.