The top online retailers in the US sent 152 promotional emails to each subscriber last year on average. That’s nearly one every other day. With that many messages going out, occasional mistakes are almost unavoidable.

I recently inducted the 2010 class in to the Oopsy Hall of Fame and what emerged was a very clear pattern of where mistakes are more likely to occur in emails. Here are the spots to keep a close eye on when writing, designing and coding your emails:

1. Subject Lines
Year after year, it’s clear that subject lines are one of the last things that marketers pull together before launching an email. Because of that, they routinely go out with inadequate scrutiny and copyediting. And every year there are at least a few emails that go out without a subject line or with a placeholder subject line.

For instance, last year pet supplies retailer Petco sent an email without a subject and apparel retailer Lands’ End sent one with the subject line “To Be Added”. Misspellings and grammar issues are also more prevalent in subject lines than in body copy.

2. Preheader Messages
With preheader messages now used by more than 70 per cent of the top US retailers, I’m seeing more errors pop up here. Preheader messages are html text at the very top of the email that highlight the main call-to-action or reiterate or extend the subject line messaging. Because of their tight connection to the subject line, they’re often written at the last minute as well and suffer similar issues.

3. First Name Personalisation
Personalised email content is playing a larger and larger role through dynamic content, triggered emails and segmentation. Personalising an email with the recipient’s name is one of the more basic personalizations, but is fraught with danger because so often marketers don’t define a default for when the recipient’s name isn’t in the database.

Whether first name personalisation is used in a subject line, preheader message, primary message or submessage banner, nothing destroys the illusion of email being one-to-one faster than the name showing up blank or as <$firstname$>, “null”, or a long number. For example, last year online bags retailer eBags’ first name personalisation failed, addressing subscribers as numbers like “10063439,” both in the subject line and in a submessage banner making product recommendations. And NFL products retailer NFLshop and cosmetics retailer Sephora’s personalised greetings were blank, while Lane Bryant’s addressed subscribers as “{friend}”.

If you’re going to do name personalisation, make sure you have a solid default value in place for when you don’t have the subscriber’s name.

4. Image Alignment
Misaligned images – caused by border values not being set to zero, style tags not being in-line, unique html text discount codes being poorly inserted, and other reasons – were probably the single biggest type of error that I saw last year. It’s a clear sign that marketers are not viewing their emails in all the major email client and browser combinations. Gmail is a known troublemaker, as is the combination of Hotmail and Firefox.

For example, last year nearly every email sent by Finish Line suffered from Gmail adding a 1 pixel border to all their images, which was extra unfortunate since the shoe retailer often slices up their primary images. And the two images that comprised the logo of electronics retailer J&R were misaligned in more than 100 emails, creating a prominent poor brand impression at the top of every email.

Besides checking the rendering of your emails across email clients and browsers, also consider a bit of defensive designing when it comes to images. For instance, use a single image for your logo and for banners with a single call-to-action.

5. Landing Pages
Nothing can torpedo your conversion rate faster than landing pages that don’t flow smoothly from the email content. Every unnecessary click that you force subscribers to make increases the chance that they’ll abandon your site.

Do product promotions in your email link to the right products on your site? Is the language in the email in sync with the language on your website? Do you use your homepage as a landing page for many of your calls-to-action? These are common trouble areas.

For instance, last year Macy’s sent an email highlighting trends for the autumn. Clicking on any of the trends listed in the email took you to the same master landing page, rather than landing pages for the individual trends. But worse than forcing subscribers to click more to get to what they were interested in was the fact that the trends listed on the master landing page didn’t totally match those in the email.

I hope that you’ll keep a close eye on these known trouble spots. Creating a pre-flight checklist is one of the best ways to help improve the quality of your emails and avoid oopsies. Creating a reaction plan for when mistakes do happen can also help minimise damage by getting fixes into place quickly. And having an apology email template on standby is also a good idea… just in case.

This article by Chad White, Research Director of Responsys and author of the Retail Email Blog comes from the website www.b2balliance.info which brings together best practice guidelines and other key information on a range of B2B Marketing & Communication topics from a powerful alliance of specialist organisations.

Chad White