How to master integrated and consistent email campaigns

Despite its age, email remains the channel of choice for brands to connect with their audiences. Unlike social media or messaging channels, it gives brands direct, personal access to their existing and potential customers. Businesses own their contact lists, tailor content to specific customer segments, and track engagement with precision.

But with power comes responsibility: Compliance risks, inconsistencies, and quality issues in your brand’s emails can damage brand reputation, hurt sales, and even lead to regulatory fines.

Despite its many pros for brands, email has one critical flaw for brands: Errors can’t be fixed once it’s sent. Emails that contain typos, broken links, off-brand messages, inaccessible design elements, or even violations of regulations like GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) can’t be recalled once they’re out there, which makes prevention the only option.

Integrated email policy solutions: the marketing Swiss Army Knife

The best way to tackle all of these challenges together is an integrated email policy solution like Siteimprove’s Email Governance. Email policy solutions build quality and compliance into the very fabric of your email marketing process, integrating with your existing email workflows to verify accessibility, regulatory adherence, and brand standards without slowing productivity.

How it works: When you create a marketing email, use Siteimprove’s pre-send validation to perform an email check. The tool automatically scans for accessibility errors, compliance lapses, outdated product references, readability, and brand standards. Real-time feedback prompts you to make corrections before you hit "send,” so you can focus on building customer trust and driving engagement without worrying about brand integrity, lost conversions, and legal penalties.

Why integration matters to your marketing ROI and brand reputation

The ROI for an email policy solution is twofold: mitigating risk and strengthening brand. Think of it as one solution to both minimize the bad and maximize the good.

Minimize the bad: Consider the real-world horror stories: a compliance violation slapping you with a massive fine, an off-message campaign confusing your audience, or a security lapse that screams "we don't care about your data." One misstep like this can erode trust and lead to irreparable reputational damage. And manual checks for regulatory compliance, accessibility, and brand standards are time-consuming, error-prone, and nearly impossible to keep consistent across teams.

Maximize the good: When they’re confident that every email sent is consistent, compliant, and error-free, your marketers can concentrate on producing compelling email campaign materials, optimizing performance, and building strong customer relationships. Your email recipients get to know a professional, reliable presence in their inbox and are more likely to engage and become loyal customers. You're proactively safeguarding your marketing investments and brand equity.

But in order to realize all these benefits (and minimize all these risks), integration among platforms is key. Siteimprove’s Email Governance goes right to the source, embedding within your existing major email platform like Salesforce Pardot, Adobe Campaign, Marketo, Optimizely Campaign, or HubSpot to check your emails in real time during creation.

Better, faster, stronger email campaigns

Manual checks are time-consuming enough. But an even bigger time suck? Doing damage control for a noncompliant email.

Imagine a world where your marketing team can create and send compelling, compliant email communication fast — a world where they have better things to do than manually check GDPR compliance before every send (spoiler alert: that world is this world).

Siteimprove’s email policy integration means immediate efficiency gains and returns time to your team so they can focus on strategy and improving your key performance indicators (KPIs).

Email policy, security, and brand standards at scale

Imagine your email marketing as a seedling. At first, it’s easy to take care of. It fits in a tiny pot, and it grows fast with just a little sun and water. Before long, it gets bigger. It needs to be pruned, fertilized, repotted. Maybe it needs pesticide and irrigation to keep growing sustainably for years.

In this analogy, the fertilizer, pesticide, and irrigation are the manual checks for brand standards and compliance you have to perform on all of your emails. When you’re starting out, doing them manually isn’t such a big deal.

But as your company grows, doing them every day for more and more emails quickly becomes unsustainable. That’s why the best time to set up your email operation for success with automated tools was yesterday, and the second-best time is now — so it can scale smoothly as your company grows and campaigns become more complex.

Policy components every marketing email needs

Every outgoing email should adhere to key policy elements that act as guardrails for your team. A governance system prevents these errors regardless of which team member is writing and sending the emails. Here are some of the requirements Siteimprove

CAN-SPAM Act (US)

• No misleading headers or deceptive subject lines
• Must identify as an advertisement
• Include a postal address and unsubscribe mechanism

GDPR (EU)

• Consent required (users must opt in)
• Easy opt-out (unsubscribe)
• Right to be forgotten (users can request deletion of their data)

CCPA and CPRA (California Privacy Rights Act)

• Right to opt out of data selling
• Privacy disclosures

There are others, too, such as CASL (Canada's Anti-Spam Law) and PECR (Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations) in the UK.

Penalties for violating these regulations can be punishing, to say the least: In extreme cases, fines for GDPR non-compliance can run as high as $21 million or 4 percent of a company’s revenue from the previous fiscal year. Neglecting them is simply not an option.

Don’t slack on accessibility

Accessibility for people with visual, auditory, cognitive, and motor impairments is too often an afterthought in business today. Not only is it important to comply with legal and accessibility standards like the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), and Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, accessible content improves usability, engagement, and overall user experience. A few accessibility best practices that Siteimprove checks for in emails:

• Clear content hierarchy with proper heading structure
• Alt text for images, with decorative images marked as empty
• WCAG color contrast standards
• Accessible links and CTAs, with descriptive link text and large touch targets
• Optimized for screen readers with a logical reading order; no tables
• Mobile-friendliness and support for a plain-text version

Secure emails, front to back, top to bottom

Email security is not just an IT concern. It's crucial for protecting your brand reputation and customer trust. Poorly secured emails can lead to phishing attacks, data breaches, compromised accounts, and customer churn. Siteimprove’s Email Governance reduces email threats by guaranteeing high-quality email experiences and avoiding the pain of "one bad email.”

Here are additional some steps you can take to layer security for your campaigns:

1. Implement SPF, DKIM, and DMARC: Protect against email spoofing and phishing by verifying that only authorized servers send emails on your behalf.
2. Use a dedicated sending domain: Separate marketing emails from transactional emails to protect high-priority communications.
3. Enable email encryption: Use TLS in transit to prevent interception.
4. Consider integrated cloud email security (ICES) and secure email gateway (SEG): Block phishing attempts, malware, and unauthorized emails before they reach inboxes.
5. Use multi-factor authentication (MFA): Require MFA for all employees accessing email marketing platforms.
6. Limit user permissions: Provide access only to necessary team members and enforce role-based access controls (RBAC).
7. Pre-send validation: Use an integrated email policy solution (like Siteimprove) to scan for broken links, compliance issues, and potential security risks.
8. Use trusted link tracking and URL shorteners: Avoid public URL shorteners (e.g., Bit.ly) that attackers can exploit.
9. Monitor for brand impersonation: Use DMARC monitoring tools to detect spoofed emails pretending to be from your brand.
10. Create an incident response plan: Prepare a protocol for handling compromised email accounts or phishing attacks targeting your brand.

Security measures enforce brand policy across all campaigns. Siteimprove’s automated policy compliance checks ensure adherence to these practices so you can send with confidence. Never forget the unsubscribe link or alt text again.

Easy email management

Real talk: Getting employees to universally adopt a new tool is a big lift. If your team won’t use it, it's useless. Seamless integration with your existing marketing stack and an intuitive, user-friendly interface are critical to successful adoption. Other critical features in our email solution include:

• Bulletproof pre-send checks
• Automated accessibility validation
• Built-in policy compliance for legal and brand guidelines
• Scalability

Time to measure the impact

Congrats, you’ve chosen and implemented an email policy and security solution. Now sit back and watch the benefits roll in. No, really. Siteimprove provides data to track improvements in quality and compliance. Here are a few to keep an eye on.

• Workflow efficiency: Automated checks can cut manual review time significantly.
• Team productivity: Streamlined governance can dramatically boost overall marketing team efficiency.
• Reclaim your time: Pre-send validation prevents potential errors that can damage your brand.
• Compliance reliance: Fewer fines, fewer legal headaches, more money staying where it belongs.
• Brand consistency: Every email reinforces your brand identity, building trust and recognition.

Future-proof your marketing email strategy

Integrated email governance is no longer a luxury for marketing leaders. It's the nerve center of a modern, responsible marketing operation. Not only does a governance system empower consistent, compliant, and high-performing campaigns, it scales with your company, safeguards your brand reputation, and moves your team from reactive to proactive.

The best governance tools don’t just tackle today's challenges; they anticipate tomorrow's. Stop the email tightrope walk. Stay ahead of compliance and quality standards. All that's left is to capitalize on your competitive edge.