The Email Wars

Here is something you should do every quarter with your site, campaign sites and any other opt in mechanisms you have in place. The opt in audit is a simple one, yet so important to growing your lists and promoting the actions you want to have take place with subscribers/leads.

1. Find all of the opt in forms on your site(s)
2. Subscribe with some of your seed addresses that you have for MSN, Yahoo, AOL, Outlook, Outlook 2007 etc. If you have subscribed with these email addresses before, create some new ones to test so that the process is clean and controllable.
3. Sign in JUST as you have intended the process to work
4. Check the Thank you, Already subscribed pages and the form steps/fields, to make sure that they are all working and capturing correctly.
5. Check your inboxes for this test for: time to double opt in or opt in email receipt to reach your inbox, what email arrives, if you have any dynamic data elements do they work right, and how do the emails render.
6. Place any email in a holding box and watch for any triggers you have set up to make sure that they are going out and are delivered at the right intervals you have specified in your code.
7. Open the headers of the emails and check for any delivery issues, DomainKeys, SenderID records, etc.
8. Login to your email database and look at each record. Check for Time/date/IP/web page stamps if your system does this. Look to see that all of the opt in data was collected and properly placed in the fields you have specified.

If you can make this a process that you repeat quarterly (or monthly if you have high volumes of opt ins) you should be able to catch anything that needs to be changed or fixed.