As email marketers, we’ve all experienced the fear of pressing send. And it really is frightening.

You’ve spent hours (maybe, days) writing, designing, proofreading, testing and then proofreading again your latest email campaign. And now, you’ve reached the point at which you need to wave it good-bye.

But you can’t.  The fear! Your finger is shivering above the mouse button; you’re frightened to death that you’ve got something wrong or forgotten a vital element.

Email send anxiety isn’t something to be ashamed of, but it is common and it can be overcome. In this blog post, we’re going to consider five things anyone can do to get over this fear and commit to the send.

1. The dreaded proofread

If you’ve proofread your email copy to the point where you can no longer see the wood for the trees, it’s time to take a step back and ask someone else to take a look.

You’ve reached the point of no return. Trust yourself that you’ve checked it thoroughly, and wait for the feedback from your trusted third party.

2. Dead links

An email campaign that heads out with a dead link is – let’s be honest – an absolute waste of time. It also looks pretty bad to your audience.

This is why we’re all so worried about the health of links within our emails. It’s also why you should focus most of your testing on ensuring the links are all present and correct. Conduct a separate test send for this task where you avoid reading the copy and instead simply click every link.  This will ease the fear of pressing send

3. Fear of poor rendering

We’ll probably never reach an age where emails are guaranteed to display correctly no matter the email client. There are simply too many variables to take into account.

This leads many marketers to fear the possibility of their hard work looking dreadful on certain clients.  More email send anxiety.

To get over this fear, keep things simple; never over-design. And use your email marketing client’s ability to test the display of the message in the most popular clients.

You’ll never get it perfect on every case, but tweak it mildly until you’re happy with the test results.

4. Bad results

Bad news: some of the email campaigns you send will bomb – spectacularly.

It doesn’t matter how great you think a campaign is – sometimes it simply won’t chime with the audience.

Get over it. Learn from it. No one can send email marketing messages that are consistently successful. Take the rough with the smooth and use your mistakes to inform future campaigns.

5. Screwed up personalisation

If your name is Jane and you receive an email addressed to Simon, you’d be forgiven for being a little miffed.

Fear of getting personalisation wrong is entirely understandable. Personalising email marketing campaigns is a brilliant way to raise engagement and engender trust, and the thought of screwing that up is rather unpalatable.

The truth is you may well get one or two names wrong; data is rarely perfect. However, if you ensure you data capture is as tight as it should be (a minimal website form, for instance) and – obviously – avoid purchased lists, you should avoid irritating your best prospects.

Wrapping up the fear

It’s entirely natural to be anxious when sending an email – particularly when you know the size of both the audience and opportunity.

We hope these five tips will ease your mind a little, though. The takeaway is simple: accept things will never be perfect, but do your homework and testing!  You will soon overcome the fear of pressing send.