Fess up now - anyone who has been in email marketing for more than a year or two has made a fair share of mistakes, and if we're smart, we've learned from them. So I'm going to share some of the doozies I've experienced over the years, and then invite all of you to jump in with your own examples.

1. In an email message from a corporation's chairman to all employees announcing changes in corporate strategy, no one really proofread the signature block, resulting in this title: Chairman of the Bord. Should spell check have found this? Yes. But we often don’t even glance down at the signature block or footnotes. And with dynamic content (aka personalized or merged content), you have to check every version.

2. Speaking of spell check, it should not be your only spelling and grammar reviewer. Have a live human being with good grammar and spelling skills proofread your email messages. One of my customers in the real estate industry proudly emailed that her company “raised” buildings so it can then replace them with more eco-friendly buildings. I think she meant “razed” or tore down buildings, but instead gave the exact opposite meaning. And we’ve all read content where “there” and “their” and “they’re” were used incorrectly. While it may be common, there are plenty of people who cringe when they see these kinds of mistakes – and that’s not the reaction you want.

3. This morning I received an email message addressed to “Dear John.” My name is Marcy. Enough said. (Read: Dear {firstname}, Mind If I Get Personal?)

4. At a job several years ago, my co-worker sent one of my direct mail projects to the printer when I was out sick. Someone had inserted an 800 number that I’d never seen before, and when I dialed it, I was referred to a 900 number that turned out to be some kind of “dial-a-babe” service. We were able to intercept the delivery truck on its way to the post office and had to throw out thousands of mailers. You can bet I now check every phone number, Web and email address in every email message, confirmation page, auto-responder email … you get the idea.

5. With subscribers and customers typing their own names into registration forms, quality control is much harder to maintain. At another job, a mistake that kept our staff laughing for days was in a personalized letter sent to programmers. Here’s what happened:

We had imported a name from a third-party mailing list that looked something like this: Jon Smith Mgr Programming & Anal - the word "Analysis" had been truncated to fit the maximum field length of 32 characters.

Our personalization program extracted the last word from the name field to create the last name field, and used it in the salutation: Dear Mr. Anal –

The recipient did not have a sense of humor and wrote a scathing letter to our CEO. If it happened today, that letter could reach thousands through social networks in just a few hours.

The truth is you can never completely avoid errors, but prudent proofreading and employing good list hygiene can go a long way. Here are some of my personal quality control (QC) best practices:

1. Read each email message or letter twice: first for overall impact. How does it look in your preview pane? Is the subject line attention getting? Can you scan the email message easily? Do you get the key message in a quick read? Does the call to action motivate you to click? Is it easy to take the next step?

2. Then go back and read it again – word by word – looking at the spelling and grammar, and checking the signature block, footers, legalese and personalization. Check each and every link all the way through. If there’s a phone number, make sure it’s accurate. Dial it if you’re not sure.

One of my colleagues used to proofread backwards (starting at the end of a sentence and working back word-by-word) so the eye wouldn’t have the tendency to skim over phrases. This may seem like overkill, but if I had a really high visibility piece that was subject to intense scrutiny, this very cautious approach may be warranted.

3. Use automated spelling and grammar tools, but always have a second pair of eyes proofread your materials, and ask your proofreader to follow the process outlined above.

4. Proofread every version. If you have 20 different signatures, make sure you sign off on each. This helps catch not only typos in names and signatures, but changes in staff, territories and so on that may not have been updated in the database.

5. QC your email list. Several of these errors could be avoided by doing an eyeball edit of your list before you start personalizing. If you’re going to parse the name field to create first and last names, check the results. Sort by the first or last name field and look through the list. You can skim through thousands of names quickly and spot egregious errors fairly easily. You can also use macros in Excel to look for things like names longer than 10 characters or less than three characters. This gives you a shortcut for reviewing just the outliers.

So I’ve told you about some of my mistakes – now it’s your turn. Post your funny and/or horrifying mistakes and tell us what you learned from them.

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