Email & SMS Checklist: The Essential Best Practices
A solid email and SMS marketing checklist covers seven areas: compliance and consent, deliverability, list and segmentation hygiene, campaign and automation setup, copy and creative, timing and frequency, and measurement. Miss any one of these and the rest of the program suffers, no matter how good your individual campaigns look on paper.
Use this as a working audit — run through it against your current program, not just a new one, since the most common failures we see at Salterra are in programs that were set up correctly once and have quietly drifted since.
Compliance & Consent Checklist
Compliance isn’t a legal afterthought bolted onto a finished program — it’s the foundation everything else is built on. A program with brilliant copy and a beautifully mapped automation strategy is still exposed if the underlying consent isn’t documented properly, and that exposure only becomes visible when a complaint, an audit, or a carrier enforcement action forces the issue.
- Use double opt-in for email where feasible — it confirms genuine interest and protects your sender reputation from typo-trap and bot signups.
- Keep documented, timestamped consent records for SMS separately from email consent — the two are legally distinct and regulators expect separate proof for each.
- Include a working unsubscribe link in every email and honor opt-outs immediately, not on a delayed batch process.
- Support STOP/HELP keywords for SMS and confirm your platform processes them instantly — this is a carrier requirement, not optional best practice.
- Disclose message frequency and data rates (“message and data rates may apply”) at the point of SMS opt-in.
- Review your privacy policy to ensure it accurately reflects how subscriber data is collected, used, and shared.
Most platforms make the technical side of these items straightforward to configure — the failure point is usually process, not technology. Someone changes an opt-in form during a website redesign and drops the consent checkbox. A new SMS keyword campaign launches without the required disclosure language. Build these checks into your standard launch process for any new form, campaign type, or platform change, rather than assuming a setup done correctly once will stay correct indefinitely.
Deliverability Checklist
Deliverability determines whether any of your other work even reaches an inbox. It’s invisible when it’s healthy and expensive to rebuild once it’s damaged, which is exactly why it deserves standing attention rather than a one-time setup checkbox.
- Authenticate your sending domain with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC before your first campaign — this is foundational, not optional.
- Warm up new sending domains gradually, starting with your most engaged segment before expanding to the full list.
- Monitor bounce rate and spam complaint rate continuously, not just after a campaign underperforms.
- Suppress hard bounces immediately and remove or re-permission chronically disengaged subscribers on a regular cadence.
- Register SMS sending numbers properly (10DLC, toll-free verification, or short code) and avoid sending from unregistered or improperly categorized numbers.
- Run periodic inbox placement tests through a tool like GlockApps or Mail-Tester rather than trusting open-rate data alone.
List & Segmentation Checklist
- Never buy, rent, or scrape a list — every subscriber should have opted in directly to your brand.
- Segment new sign-ups separately from your core list until they’ve engaged at least once.
- Build engagement-based segments (active, at-risk, dormant) and treat each differently rather than sending identical content to all three.
- Layer in behavioral and purchase-based segments as data accumulates — browsing behavior, purchase category, order frequency.
- Sunset chronically unengaged subscribers on a defined schedule rather than letting dead weight silently drag down deliverability indefinitely.
Campaign & Automation Checklist
- Confirm your core automations are live: welcome series, abandoned cart, post-purchase, and win-back, at minimum.
- Review automation logic and content on a recurring schedule — flows built once and forgotten are one of the most common sources of quietly declining performance.
- Set frequency caps so a subscriber can’t receive an automated flow message and a broadcast campaign within the same short window.
- Confirm exit conditions on every automation — a customer who completes a purchase shouldn’t keep receiving abandoned-cart messages for that same item.
Copy & Creative Checklist
- Front-load subject lines with real value or urgency rather than clever-but-vague phrasing that doesn’t tell the reader what’s inside.
- Write genuine preview text as a second line of copy, not a repeat of the subject line.
- Design emails mobile-first since most opens now happen on a phone screen.
- Keep SMS copy short, branded, and single-purpose — identify your business by name and lead with one clear call to action.
- Proofread every send — broken merge tags and typos in the subject line are among the fastest ways to damage credibility at scale.
Timing & Frequency Checklist
- Test send times against your specific audience rather than copying a generic “best time to send” recommendation from a blog post.
- Cap SMS frequency conservatively — SMS tolerance for volume is far lower than email’s, and over-texting drives opt-outs fast.
- Respect time zones and reasonable hours, particularly for SMS, where a message arriving at an inconvenient hour reads as far more intrusive than an email would.
- Balance promotional and non-promotional content on your calendar so the list doesn’t come to associate your brand purely with sales pitches.
Measurement Checklist
- Track revenue per recipient, not just open and click rates, as your primary success metric.
- Monitor list growth net of unsubscribes and complaints, not just gross sign-ups.
- Review automation performance individually, since a strong overall program average can mask one badly underperforming flow.
- Compare SMS and email contribution separately so you understand which channel is actually driving which outcomes rather than crediting results to the wrong one.
Frequently Asked Questions
What's the single most important item on this checklist?
Compliance and consent, because everything else depends on it. A program with excellent copy and strong automations built on a poorly-consented list is exposed to legal risk and carrier penalties that can shut the whole channel down regardless of how good the content is.
How often should I run through this checklist?
Treat the compliance and deliverability sections as a standing, ongoing responsibility rather than a one-time setup task, and do a full audit against every section at least quarterly, since lists, platforms, and regulations all shift over time.
What's the fastest way to damage email deliverability?
Sending to a purchased or unengaged list without proper authentication in place. High bounce and spam-complaint rates from that kind of send can damage sender reputation quickly, and rebuilding it takes far longer than it took to break.
Is double opt-in necessary for every business?
It's not legally required everywhere, but it's a strong best practice because it confirms the subscriber genuinely wants to hear from you, which protects long-term deliverability even where it isn't mandated.
What compliance rules apply specifically to SMS?
In the United States, the TCPA governs SMS consent requirements, and carriers separately enforce their own filtering rules around registration, content, and frequency. Requirements vary by jurisdiction, so businesses operating internationally should confirm the specific rules that apply to each market they text into.
Terry has 30+ years in software and SEO. He’s the founder of Salterra Digital Services and SEO Spring Training, host of the Roundtable SEO Mastermind, and lead instructor at SEO University — teaching the exact tactics his team uses on client work.
Continue learning
Ready to master this?
This guide is one lesson from the Email SMS – GHL course. Get every lesson, framework and checklist — plus the full 38-course catalog — inside SEO University.
Practitioner-focused training across the full digital marketing stack — from technical SEO to conversion optimization and the AI search era. By Salterra Digital Services, since 2011.