6 Essentials for Putting the Q in QA

When I tell my Marketo students that, in a perfect world, half their time for any digital marketing initiative should be spent designing and building and half testing and QA, they laugh at me. The world, alas, is sadly imperfect.

That doesn’t mean you can forget QA, though. I also tell my students it’s a lot easier to check first than to send an apology email later. Here are 6 areas that you must cover, to ensure quality QA:

1) Copy Editing: Make sure you check the grammar, logical flow, and appearance of your content – and that includes emails, landing pages and form field labels. While an extra space between lines won’t kill you, and a misplaced capital letter is hardly a crime, it smacks of being unprofessional. Clean it up, people.

2) Looks Matter: Ok, it reads well now, but do the links go where they’re supposed to? Does the email look right in several email clients? Mac and PC? How about the landing pages? Is the alignment ok on Mac and PC (and increasingly important, handheld devices)? Are the images working? How about in different browsers? What happens when you fill out the form? Does it go to the right page? Alt-tags? Meta tags?

3) Program Set Up: If you’re using Marketo, make sure you’ve set up your costs and custom tags, and you’ve got the right steps for your program statuses (based on the channel). Every program should have at least one cost tag, even if it’s $0. It makes for better, cleaner reporting down the line.

4) Program Statuses: Why? Every time I teach, someone asks me why they should bother with these…especially if they only have one email to send because they’re doing a pilot. Without them, you can’t learn about how far your leads progressed into your program and how effective it was. Reporting is essential. Don’t forget these easy, but required, smart campaign flow steps.

5) Flow Testing: You have to send to a test list. Not just the test emails that you send, but really, to a list. Make sure the tokens are filling in correctly. That you get the right responses from auto-response campaigns under the right actions. That you’re removed from a campaign at the right place, if you’ve included that as a requirement. You’ll need at least one email address to check every possible variation through your campaign flow, so recruit colleagues and give them roles (you open, you ignore, you click after the first email, you click after the second email, etc.). Make sure you get the feedback from their experiences. This is where you can test that your program statuses (see step 4) are working correctly.

6) The List: You absolutely MUST verify that you are sending to the right people. Make sure your list is the size you expect it to be, and spot check to make sure the right leads are showing up in your list. Error proof this one, because you can’t back out once you hit that send button!

While this is an overview, and there are lots of details for each of these areas, making sure you don’t skip any of the steps above will help get you on your way…until the world is perfect.

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