RetailEmail.blogspot tracks the email campaigns of the top online retailers and creates an annual listing of some of the most infamous marketing slips and gaffes of the year. Here are a few of my favorites from 2007:

• CompUSA, 4/15 — NEW LG Monitors & Samung TVs Now Available. It's pretty bad when you misspell your own brand name, but it's worse when you misspell someone else's.
• Avon, 6/26 — Get Award-Winning Results + FREE Ship on ANY eRepresentative Order. Avon made the “free ship” error in this subject line—and then went on to do it 28 more times between July and November. Nothing like learning from mistakes.
• MLB, 3/30 — Watch the Civil Rights Game LIVE on ESPN. The content for this email completely blank. MLB tried to rectify their mistake by resending the email on 3/31. Unfortunately the content was completely blank again. Tough week in sports.

Other examples included missing images, test messages mailed to entire lists, incorrect images, errors in grammar and spelling, and odd spacing. While it's easy to scoff at these examples, unfortunately, I'm also acquainted with that sinking feeling that comes when you've just hit “send” and realized that the marketing message sent was less than perfect.

Through trial and error, Hodgson has created a pre-send checklist for our newsletters and those of our clients. Here's a few things on our list:

1. Send to the right list. Sounds simple, but beware of sending to your unsubscribe list, or of sending a test or targeted email to your entire list.
2. One word: Spell-check.
3. Check all the links in the email, especially key calls-to-action.
4. View a test send in accounts from all the major email clients, or use a rendering tool to ensure consistent rendering across platforms.
5. Have someone else look over the email before it goes out. It's difficult to catch your own errors. Proofread in a plain text editor, so you're not distracted by images, and consider reading your copy backwards, so errors in spelling and usage pop out.
6. If you make a mistake in an image, simply correct the source file.
7. Don't resend emails that contain minor mistakes. Only resend those where the mistake has significantly impaired the message.
8. If the error is significant, see if you can halt the send. You may be able to stop your entire list from receiving the erroneous email.
9. Develop a protocol for your apology emails so you can respond quickly when serious mistakes happen.
10. Consider holding brief post-deployment debriefings to review what went right and wrong during the email development and deployment.

For an excellent source of things to consider having on your pre-send checklist, take a look at the Email Marketer's Club Wiki's Things to check before you launch your email campaign.

As I'm out talking with clients, I'm always pitching the importance of metrics and measurement. But, as in any measuring, using the right yardstick is important. The key is to figure out which metrics are truly important for a particular business objective and then regularly track changes in them. A strategic metric:

• Is directly related to your business objectives.
• Is key to understanding what's happening, not just data that's available and easy to retrieve. Unless you limit the amount of data you try to understand to the essentials, you're likely to become overwhelmed and stop monitoring at all.
• Promotes action, that is, gets you or others in your business to improve what you're doing as a result of what you're seeing.

Here are a few examples of appropriate metrics for specific business objectives:

As you review your site you'll be able to identify the metrics that are critical for you to monitor. Monthly monitoring is probably sufficient for most businesses, however, if your environment changes rapidly, you may want to look at weekly monitoring. Graphic reporting is usually best—that way you can spot trends and take action in time to seize an opportunity or dodge a catastrophe.

If you use Google Analytics, you'll have access to many built in metrics—visits, pageviews, pages per visit, bounce rate, average time on site, percentage new visits, traffic sources, etc. You can also establish your own goals, and track those using Google's tools. To move beyond Google's built-in metrics plug key numbers into a spreadsheet and employ formulas to calculate the specialized measurements that are most meaningful to your particular business.