Don’t Let Typos Kill Your Email Marketing

Don’t Let Typos Kill Your Email Marketing As a web guy, I love the ability to be able to go back and edit content as many times as is necessary, or just update what I have written.  With print and email marketing, you don’t have that luxury. The funny thing is that you can write content that is 99.9% accurate, but one mistake and people notice.

I recently did a newsletter and had proofread it three times and had an associate check it as well.  Somehow, we both missed a typo.  The email went out to about 1000 clients, friends, and some family.  While a lot of people didn’t mention it, a couple people did. ( I am sure others noticed it but were too polite to mention it)

In this case, as the error was in the link text of a URL, it wasn’t picked up by my spellcheck.

So for instance https://microsof.com wouldn’t be picked up as an error even though it is missing a “t” and Microsoft would be usually picked up in a dictionary.

My mistake was that although I read through it, the link in question was only one letter off and it got by me (and of course the spell check).

While this wasn’t a major mistake, to prospective clients, finding typos does not portray you in a good light.

So what can you do to prevent this from happening?

  1. Read your posts out loud, sometimes that helps you to identify errors that look correct but are off, as in the case of the hyperlink I mentioned.
  2. Make sure you click on all hyperlinks and make sure they are going where intended and to the target you have set. This is web design 101, and while I would never miss this creating a website, in my email software, it slipped by me.
  3. Hold off on sending your email. Sometimes it helps to save your work and come back to it and read it again. So, perhaps wait until the next day, reread your email and then send it out.
  4. Don’t be overly dependent on programs, like spellcheck. They are not infallible!

Bottom line:

When you are working on print or emails, remember once they are out there, they are out there forever.  So, any mistakes you make cannot be fixed.   Take the extra time needed and make sure there are no mistakes, either grammatically or even within your hyperlinks.