How to Validate Landing Pages for Emails

Email is the largest channel used for marketing campaigns. Businesses stuff them with good deals, compelling announcements, and information they hope will resonate with customers while complying with regulations like CAN-SPAM or GDPR. As such, marketing emails have a ton of links in them: 

• Unsubscribe 
• Privacy policy
• Social media
• Terms & conditions 
• Other website content
• Several calls to action

Creating marketing emails also involves a lot of people:

• Copywriter writes it
• Editor changes it
• Designer adds graphics or lays it out
• Email marketer codes and builds it
• An internal test is sent 
• Another round of review and changes are made
• It finally gets sent

There are many potential points of failure in that process where things can get overwritten or links fall off or point to the wrong place. It’s labor intensive, especially if you’re sending a lot of emails, to manually check everything. 

As always, that’s where ObservePoint comes in! Landing Page Validation for Emails (we like to shorten it to LPV4E) is a new feature we’ve released in beta that helps you validate every single link in an email, so you never have to worry about your boss pinging you about a mistake that’s too late to catch. 

How does LPV4E work? Think of it as just another way to kick off an Audit run:

1. Inside the ObservePoint platform, you can create an Email Inbox, which will generate an email address for you.
2. Assign an Audit to your Email Inbox (Audits are the building blocks of how ObservePoint scans your web pages and is where you can define parameters and rules: scan this many pages, look for this, alert me if this is broken, etc.)
3. Forward the marketing emails you want audited to this email address or simply add the address to your seed list.
4. ObservePoint will automatically extract all the links contained in your email and use them as Starting URLs for your Audits.
5. Once the Audits complete scanning, you will get a full summary of the findings as well as any alerts you’ve configured.
6. Feel like you’ve crossed your t’s and dotted all i’s. 

If you’re already an ObservePoint customer, that probably doesn’t sound too hard. If you’re new, please reach out for a demo or sign up for Free Trial to poke around at your own pace!