Email marketing must be part of your inbound marketing strategy. It will help drive traffic to your website, leads for your business and provide personalized value to your community. HubSpot provides all of its customers with email marketing tools that let you send up to 50,000 emails to a list at once. You can use HubSpot's List Manager app to slice and dice your leads and customers to send them personalized, segmented email campaigns.
However, one thing I recommend everyone set up is an email seed list. A seed list is a list of email addresses that you will send an email to before you send the email out to everyone on your list. A seed list allows you to test the email across different email clients and devices. This will give you the ability to measure the email's deliverability, appearance, and make adjustments before it gets sent to everyone on your list.
You should create an internal seed list composed of co-workers, friends or family that can help you test your emails. I would include at least five or more people on the list and try to find people that use different email clients and have different mobile devices. The goal being to test your emails on a variety of different email clients and devices.
Once you have the list you need to import their first names, last names and email addresses into HubSpot. You can then use List Manager and create a seed list to start testing your emails before you send them out to the masses.
Ask people on the seed list to:
- Ask them what email client they are using
- Verify that it got delivered to their inbox
- Open the email
- Click on all of the links
- Report any image or content alignment problems
- Ask them to view the email on mobile device and note what device they used
A seed list will help eliminate errors in your emails, help ensure deliverability to the inbox and make sure your emails display well.
Have you been using a seed list to test your emails before you send them.
Image credit: tonrulkens
