How To Get A Mailshot Wrong
When you're sending out a mailshot to possibly millions of customers, it is so important to get it right when you give them a hot link to click on. Dell have just sent one out and I clicked on the "more details" link they provided and got a "page not found" error. That's really not the sort of mistake you can recover from, you can't correct the email and send it out again, you've blown it. Never mind that it doesn't look very good or that customers realise you're not perfect, the ones who find this out are the ones you most wanted to impress - you actually succeeded in getting them to click on your link to find out more. Here are seven ways you can avoid making the same mistake.
1) It's very hard to proof-read your own work, so always get someone else to do it for you. Your mind has this trick of reading what it expects to see there, and because you wrote your text you self-evidently know what it should say and you don't see a misspelling or a grammatical error.
2) If getting someone else to proof-read for you is not practical, you could alternatively leave it for a day and come back to it afresh. Or work on something else, anything you can do to distract yourself and erase the short-term memory of what you have written will help.
3) Send the email to yourself before sending it out as a mailshot. That way you will see it as it will appear to your recipients, and sometimes that too is useful way of proof-reading your own writing since it will appear to you in a different format.
4) Click on every link and make sure it takes you to the correct page on the correct site. If you are dependent on someone else to create a page you want to send people to, do not send the mailshot until that page has been created and you have checked it.
5) Make sure you are logged-out of any site you are sending people to, if that applies, or you might not realise it if you are sending them to a page in a private area of the site.
6) Visually check that any hot links you are using are indeed to web sites and not to local files on your computer or a corporate network.
7) The safest way of incorporating a hot link is to navigate to the target page and cut-and-paste the URL, the web address, directly from the address bar of your browser into your email.
- Mark Griffin's blog
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