Sarbacane Campaigns : checklist before sending your newsletter

This checklist will help you to:

• Improve the deliverability of your mailings / newsletters 
• Boost your audience's engagement rate

Contact List Checklist

• For a first send with Sarbacane Campaigns, remember to import your list of bounces into Sarbacane so that they are excluded from your sends from your first campaign and do not impact your deliverability or sender reputation
• Launch the contact analysis of your list before each send thanks to the dedicated feature in Sarbacane Campaigns. This will allow you to remove any duplicates and identify and correct incorrect addresses
• Only send your emails to contacts who have given their consent to receive your communications
• Don't forget to include an unsubscribe link and associate it with your unsubscribe list(s)

Message header checklist :

• Use an authenticated sending domain or sub-domain. Find out more about setting up domain names in Sarbacane Campaigns in this dedicated section of the Help Center.
• Do not use an address such as noreply@domaine.com as a sender and/or reply-to address. This is a bad practice that breaks up the possibility of interaction with your contacts. 
• Make sure that the reply-to email address is one that exists and to which you have access to receive any replies from your contacts, as well as any error feedback (non-existent or incorrect address, change of contact person, vacations, etc.).
• Keep your subject line short, clear and to the point (30 to 50 characters). 
• Fill in the pre-header field to complete the subject of your newsletter in your recipients' inboxes.

Content checklist

• Avoid spamwords and the inappropriate use of punctuation marks and/or capital letters in the subject, preheader and body of your message.
• Personalize your newsletter:
  • Personalize at least one element of your content (subject, preheader or message body) with your contacts' first and/or last names to improve their engagement with your brand.
  • Whenever possible, use dynamic content blocks to push personalized content to your contacts according to their profile.
• Have your message proofread before sending. To err is human, and a spelling mistake can quickly creep into a message. It's better to have your message proofread than to leave your contacts with an unprofessional image.
• If you need to send a document to your recipients, it's better to host your document online, rather than embedding an attachment in your newsletter (which would increase the weight of the message and therefore increase the risk of your message arriving in junk mail).

Links checklist

• Be sure to include a link to the web copy of your newsletter, so that your recipients can view it in a browser if they have problems viewing it in their inbox.
• Make sure you've added a legible and visible unsubscribe link
• Make sure you include links on your images and call-to-action buttons
• Check the validity of all your links 

Design and display checklist

• Consider reducing the weight of your images, and therefore of your newsletter, by using web resolution images hosted online.
• Consider adapting the mobile version of your newsletter using Sarbacane Campaigns' EmailBuilder.
• Test your newsletter on different messaging clients, webmails and reading devices

You are now ready to send your email campaign!