20 Questions to Ask When Scheduling An Email Campaign

Lessons from an Email Marketing Agency

Congratulations, you’ve developed an email campaign! We know what that means: You aligned stakeholders on goals, you wrote copy, you designed, you carefully chose creatives and decided what call-to-actions to use. Now it’s time to hit send!

Even in our own team with new hires, there’s often a misconception about how straightforward scheduling can be: “The email’s ready, lined up, and all that’s left is to pick a date and click send. What’s so complicated about that?”

Enter the nuanced tango that is email scheduling. True, there’s a few settings that need deciding when scheduling a campaign, like making sure the right people receive it, deciding which day and time to send, and checking your tracking settings. It’s the last, and final step of a long process (emails take anywhere from 1-3 weeks to develop), and everyone’s anxious to close out the task and move on with their lives.

Well then why not make haste? Chop chop!

Don’t Skimp on Scheduling

As an email marketing agency owner, email scheduling is not just the final step, it’s the critical step. Done thoughtfully, it’s where the magic lies in email marketing. Done hastily, it’s where opportunities get missed. I’d go so far to say that prioritizing email scheduling strategy is the “secret sauce” that makes us successful as a marketing agency.

Get to know the inner workings of email scheduling below so you can see the tangible steps that result in high performing email.

TL:DR: Don’t skimp on scheduling.

20 Questions to Ask Before You Schedule an Email Campaign

Making sure the campaign is ready (really, completely, unequivocally, ready). 

It doesn’t matter how many people have “checked” the campaign prior. When getting ready to schedule, test it again. Even the best, smartest, most detail-oriented person can miss a detail, especially when there’s last minute feedback on a campaign that came through a few hours ago. That means take the time to preview the campaign in your inbox and mobile phone at a minimum, and use an email testing tool like Litmus if you have access to one.

Ask yourself:

1. Are there any typos in this campaign?

Proofread carefully! There’s a joke in the industry, “The best time to find typos is when you hit send.” Unfortunately, it’s true.

Everyone makes mistakes, even the big brands. (Remember that HBO email a few months back?) Some can argue that typos make you human. But too many reflects poorly on the business. It distracts from the actual message in your campaign and over time, erodes credibility.

2. How does the campaign look in dark mode?

Dark mode isn’t only for evening send times anymore: There’s a growing number of users who opt for dark mode as their default. Did you know that dark mode can extend battery life and it’s easier on the eyes for those trying to improve their sleep? That means from an email design perspective, dark mode is essential, and unfortunately it’s complex and needs testing.

 Image Source: Dark Mode and Email

3. Are all links and alt text correct?

Double-check all links and alt text to avoid broken links and improve accessibility. Sometimes, when you’re copying and pasting a link from your own web browser, you could be copying your unique identifying tracking information with it. We try to remove that for cleaner and more accurate reporting.

Read more about Alt Text in this short guide.

4. Is the message getting clipped?

If your email is too long, it will get clipped in the inbox. What does “too long” mean? That varies, but a good rule of thumb is to use Gmail’s limit: 102 kb. There are a number of reasons images can be heavier than that, and it usually has to do with how they were designed, how many images are used, and what kind of “heavier” blocks like product blocks are used. It’s worth checking what you can do to avoid clipping before scheduling an email.  Sometimes, it means manually recreating blocks in a different, lighter format. Sometimes it means living with slightly different styles and padding than you intended.

Read more about this here: Why is Gmail clipping my email.

5. Is the coupon code working?

Not every email will have a coupon code, but if it does, make sure it actually works. If you are scheduling in advance, that means checking the coupon code settings and dates carefully on your site. Nothing will tank the performance of an email campaign like a non-functional coupon. This might seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how often the mistakes happen, usually leading to a last minute scramble that fortunately is completely avoidable.

6. Are all terms and promotions clear?

Checking that your terms, conditions, and promotional details are clearly stated is just as important in email. Is the coupon single use? Limited to X per customer? Ends on which date and time? Which timezone is that? Is it combinable with other promotions?

Part of this is setting clear expectations with the customer. It’s no fun to believe you will save 50% only to realize at checkout there’s fine print that means you won’t. That isn’t only bad for conversion, it’s bad for brand loyalty and makes the customer feel like they got sucked into a gimmick.

Make sure you’re optimizing.

A/B testing is a powerful tool of most email marketing platforms. It allows you to send campaigns with two (or more) versions, and compare the results side by side. It can be used in a variety of ways: testing subject lines, links, even promotions. However, A/B testing on its own isn’t useful; it’s applying those learnings to future sends that makes a difference.

When scheduling, it’s a great time to check in on your past A/B tests to make sure that you’re using the latest learnings. Considering that campaign development can take a few weeks, you will often find yourself in the situation of seeing A/B test results when in the middle of design and development. At our agency, we use the scheduling period to make any optimizations to ensure we make the most of these learnings as soon as we can for clients.

Ask yourself:

7. Are there any recent A/B tests to review? What are the learnings?

Check in on any A/B tests that are completed and/or are still running and ask yourself if there are any conclusions worth drawing. Does the homepage perform better than the product page? Do you get more opens when you use emojis? What do the A/B test results tell you about the audience’s preferences that you can take with you to make improvements elsewhere?

8. What can be optimized right now to incorporate those learnings?

Implement immediate optimizations based on A/B test results if you can. Sometimes this means making minor last minute changes. That’s OK, it’s what this phase is for (and how continual improvement works)! Not every A/B test learning can be used right away, some will need more development time. However, it’s always worth checking and optimizing immediately where possible.

Making sure the campaign will send to the audience it is supposed to reach.

Making sure the email reaches its target audience can be straightforward depending on how your segments are set up,  or it can take another cup of coffee to get right. It really depends on each business, each ESP. Ideally you’d have things up to date and automatic, but even when you think it’s “set,” it’s worth a final check.

Ask yourself:

9. Who is this message going to? (And who is this message not going to?)

While you will most likely have had a target audience in mind when writing the campaign, it’s time to check that you actually have a list or segment in your email marketing tool with those people. That means, checking your lists and segments. Don’t just add them blindly; ask yourself if they look right. Are they growing as they intended to? If your newsletter list had 9,000 people last month, why does it only have 8,000 people this month? Checking the definitions, the events used to create the segments, can lead you to find and troubleshoot issues and should be done regularly.

Additionally, in some tools like Hubspot, you may have to go through contacts and check that those who are recently added are set to “Marketing Contacts,” a subtlety of that platform, but other platforms have their own.

Check if there’s anyone you should be excluding from the send (e.g., recent purchasers, VIP segments, etc). It’s usually a good idea to exclude spam and bounces, though most ESPs will do that automatically.

Pay attention to your deliverability results.

Making sure the email actually reaches the intended audience can also be complex, especially if you’re facing deliverability issues. Overcoming deliverability issues is like having a few extra plates to spin and juggle, and to be honest, it’s annoying. However, it makes each send all the more important. Every campaign is an opportunity to either overcome deliverability issues or make them worse.

Read more about email deliverability on our blog here.

10. Are your personalization fields set up properly?

Often personalization fields get overlooked in campaigns, meaning someone has to actually check that your audience has the firstname filled out, ideally in proper case, for the personalization to be effective.

If you have personalization fields (i.e. firstname), take a moment to check your data.

“An Offer Just For You, sArA” just doesn’t quite hit right unless your intent was to evoke a ransom note style.

Correct obvious typos that you can find, and consider leaving it blank if it’s really nonsensical (ex: jk123).  The personalization default (like Friend) should be better than random names or numbers.

11. How’s deliverability? Check metrics.

Even if you checked them last week, check your deliverability metrics again. That means you’re looking at the dashboards in your email marketing tool, but also checking into any postmaster tools you might have set up, like Google Postmaster or similar for other Inbox providers.

You’re looking to see if there’s any known issues, so you can decide whether to skip certain segments in this campaign.

Watch our YouTube video with an example of this.

12. Are there any open deliverability protocols we are following? How are they going? 

To tackle deliverability issues, we often have to scale back our emails to only the people who are most likely to engage with them positively. Meaning, if your list is 10,000, but you’re having deliverability issues, you might choose to send to the most engaged 6,000 of that list for a while.

Take a closer look at metrics to see how they are recovering and trending. If they’re going up again, it might be time to broaden your sends again. Is this the right campaign to do so? It’s nuanced and different for every situation, but always looking at performance closely from the deliverability angle is a good starting point.

13. Should we adapt our sending segments in any way in light of deliverability issues?

Decide based on recent performance if there’s any adaptations needed to the audience of this campaign.

Some ways to do this:

• Split the campaign into smaller sends; e.g., high engaged group first, broader group second.
• Exclude any particular inbox providers if you have open issues you’re investigating with them, or at least limit the send to a highly engaged group with that inbox provider.

There’s so many variations of adjustments you can make, but scheduling is the time to review and adapt.

14. Are my segments performing as expected?

It’s a good time to ask yourself whether your high-performing segments are still high-performing. We should be seeing trends going up overall, while there can be variations with each campaign of course. If you’re not seeing that, ask yourself why not? What’s changed? It’s a good time to check out metrics like Average Order Value, Placed Order Rate, Customer Lifetime Value.

Analyze engaged segments to glean insights and improve future campaigns.

Don’t overlook billing and account management.

An oft overlooked part of email scheduling is that, at the moment of scheduling a campaign, the ESP will force you to upgrade. It will let you know if you’ve reached new limits. Growth and rising costs are par for the course in any industry, and mostly it’s a good sign, it means your list is growing. However, part of having strong ROI in email is keeping costs at bay, so it’s a perfect opportunity to make sure you’re staying lean where possible.

Ask yourself:

15. Will this campaign tip us into a new billing tier? Is it worth it?

If you’re seeing a message that by scheduling this campaign you’ll be upgrading your monthly plan, it’s a good time to ask yourself if the upgrade is worth it. Review the last few campaigns, make sure the segments you’re sending to are correct and accurate. Review the list cleaning measures you have in place; when’s the last time you cleaned your list?

There may be some small measures you can take immediately to postpone the upgrade without sacrificing email performance; you just have to dig a little into the metrics to figure out what that is exactly. It will be different for every business.

 16. Am I doing everything I can to keep costs at bay?

While checking your account billing, it’s also a good time to take a closer look at any other cost-saving tactics. For example, are you sending MMS vs SMS messages, or sending to different countries/markets? These typically come with different billing rates. Always approach it with the question, based on past performance, do I have reason to believe these costs will pay off?

You’ve made it to the final settings.

You’ve waded through the account from various angles, checked, re-checked, made minor adjustments, now it’s time to pull the trigger and get this scheduled.

Ask yourself:

17. What’s the best time and date to send this?

Think about the account, best send times, the campaign content and when it should “hit” inboxes. As a general rule of thumb, go with what performs best historically for your account. There are some exceptions, particularly holiday messages where you know most inboxes will be flooded with similar content, it’s smart to be early (5-8am). People get inbox fatigue, so keep that in mind. Usually it’s best to schedule for the recipient timezone, but remember a general understanding of your list’s geographic location will help you with this.

It’s time to hit send.

With everything you’ve looked at, I’ll be honest, it’s still daunting to hit “Schedule/Send.” But at some point, you’ll reach a phase of analysis paralysis and you just have to call it. Do what you can to make it the best campaign yet, and go ahead and click schedule.

Turn to your village for communication and feedback loops.

In any setting, email marketing takes a village. Whether you’re in-house or agency side, a small brand or a big brand, chances are there’s multiple people involved in developing email marketing campaigns.  And every person along the way benefits from a shared understanding of the account.  Whether that’s A/B test winners, performance, deliverability issues, when you’re knee deep analyzing the performance is the perfect time to communicate and strategize, too.

18. Who needs to see this final campaign?

Once your campaign is scheduled, it’s time to do some communication. This is when you share it with your teams – social media, website, client, whoever that is. Who in your company needs to know this is out the door? Aligning your messaging and repurposing content is important – you’ll likely have people downstream who will want to use this as a reference.

If you’re new to content repurposing as a strategy check out this guide from Buffer (a social media scheduling tool).

19. Who needs to understand performance metrics and deliverability status?

You’ve waded through so much analysis to schedule, take a minute and reflect about who on the team would benefit from this information. I personally tend to err on the side of over-communicating.  Whether that means an update in Slack to your team, an update to your client or other stakeholders via email, let them know the high level nuggets you found during these last few hours:

• What content has performed well? 
• What A/B tests did you see? 
• Any changes you made to campaigns and why?
• Anything worth noting regarding deliverability?

No one is a mind-reader, sadly, and if you expect others to make adjustments or incorporate learnings you generally have to spell it out. These types of lessons aren’t casually stumbled upon, most people who navigate to dashboards will not read them with an innate understanding of what to do next. I believe it’s your job as email scheduler to connect the dots and get others on board, too.

20. Are there opportunities for improvement?

Scheduling is a beast, and every single time I do it, I find ideas for improving for next time.  Whether that’s adapting agency SOPs, updating checklists, or ideas for new A/B tests. At the end of the scheduling process is a perfect time to set in motion any of these opportunities you may have come across.

By approaching email scheduling analytically, you’ll ensure your email marketing remains strategic, performant and on point.

The next time you think, “Let me just take 5 minutes to schedule this email,”  try taking longer and making it an integral, valued part of the process. You might be surprised at what you find when you dig in and look closely.

About Centric Squared

Centric Squared is a growing email marketing agency driving significant revenue for our clients through Email and SMS Marketing. With a focus on CRM-driven marketing, our team of global marketing experts has generated $3 million in revenue for our clients last year alone. We’re committed to transforming businesses with data-driven strategies that enhance customer engagement and foster resilient growth. 

Our Email Deliverability Consulting Services are designed to diagnose, troubleshoot, and resolve these issues, putting your email marketing back on the path to success.