Your Guide to Email Proofreading and Foolproof Messages

It’s every marketer’s email proofreading nightmare: an email goes out to a large segment of your audience, only for you to discover that it has a typo in the headline, a broken call-to-action link, or a half paragraph missing. The last thing you want to do is send another “oops” follow-up that clarifies the mistake.

The importance of proofreading emails is undeniable. Every typo or grammatical mistake potentially lowers your brand credibility. In fact, according to one survey, 97% of people say grammar mistakes influence their perceptions of companies and individuals.

Meanwhile, broken links can frustrate and confuse your audience while decreasing deliverability in the process. Also, every broken link is a missed opportunity to capture your audience’s action and interest.

But here’s the good news. A simple email proofreading checklist can help ensure that, before you hit “send” on your next marketing email, none of these potential issues become real-world problems. This guide will help you build that checklist.

Step 1: Start Your Email Proofreading With an Email Test

Klaviyo’s email preview and testing features can become your best friend during email proofreading. They allow you to see exactly how your recipients will view your emails, making this the go-to view for most, if not all, of the below steps. Preview the email in Klaviyo’s platform, then send yourself a test to see what it looks like in your email client.

Step 2: Check for Any Broken and Forgotten Links

Broken links point to the wrong spot, while forgotten links are most common in graphics that are meant to act as buttons but don’t have a link attached. Preview your email to check both:

1. Make sure that all links go to the correct URL.
2. Check that all tracking parameters are attached as needed.

Step 3: Run a Simple Email Proofreading Spell Check

Automated spell checks tend to catch 90% of email proofreading errors. Some of the available tools, like Sapling, integrate directly with Klaviyo. This makes running a basic spell check a breeze every time you send an email. This simple, automated step alone can save quite a few headaches related to typos, grammatical mistakes, and awkward sentence phrasing.

Step 4: Proofread Your Email Manually for Typos and Spelling Errors

While spell checks are great, they cannot account for everything. You’ll still need to manually read through your emails to make sure your audience can grasp the content easily. One tip many professional writers follow is this: read each word in your email content from back to front. This helps you avoid falling prey to the common shortcuts our brains use when reading, including chunking and typoglycemia.

Step 5: Check for Distorted Images and Graphics

Emails with graphics have a higher open and click-through rate than those without graphics. But if those graphics and images are distorted, that benefit becomes a disadvantage. Stop your email templates from distorting the graphics just to fit the template by double-checking that every image and button you include still has the same proportions as it did when you uploaded it.

Step 6: Proofread the Email Subject Line

Because it’s not part of your email body, it’s easy to overlook the subject line as part of your email proofreading efforts. But it might just be the most important component of your email as a whole. Take special care to ensure that it’s not just short and actionable but also free of any typos or awkward phrases. When in doubt, Klaviyo’s subject line assistant can help.

Step 7: Proofread Emails for Personalization

We know about the importance of personalization in all of your email communications. But what happens when the backend stops working and all those personalization codes fire wrong or don’t fire at all? Here, a test send with yourself as the contact can become an important part of proofreading emails. Make sure that every personalization piece, from the recipient’s name to custom content throughout the body, shows up exactly as intended in your inbox.

Step 8: Check the Plain Text and Web Versions

Emails are at their best in full HTML view, but some recipients prefer to view them as simple text regardless. Don’t ignore that part of your audience; instead, take care to review and edit the plain text version of your email before the send. Similarly, if your email template has a “View in Browser” link, make sure the webpage version of the message looks just as good as the regular version.

Step 9: Cross-Check Your Email Across Clients and Devices

Even if you know the most popular devices and email clients your audience uses to view your emails, chances are there are at least some more uncommon versions. Using Klaviyo’s preview tool, check to make sure that your email looks just as good on mobile devices as on desktop screens and just as beautiful on Outlook apps as on Gmail and other clients.

Step 10: Double-Check for Accessibility

Your emails, like all elements of your digital presence, should be accessible to all audiences. Klaviyo has built a helpful checklist to walk through that you can use to ensure your subject lines, preview text, images, colors, and link text are all designed to be just as easy to read for users with disabilities as they are for the rest of your audience.

Improve Your Messaging With Thorough Email Proofreading

The importance of proofreading emails that represent your business and products is impossible to overstate. Typos matter, but so do potential problems like broken personalized fields, links, and images. A check to make sure each of these elements is in place can go a long way toward designing better email messaging.

But as you build out more complex email strategies, that can begin to seem like a daunting task. Fortunately, it doesn’t need to be. As mentioned throughout this guide, Klaviyo has integrated several tools to help ease the process. Also, you can always seek the help of professionals when needed. Contact us today to optimize your email marketing processes and strategies.