Guide

The email QA checklist regulated senders actually use

Email is the only marketing channel with no rollback. A landing page typo is a quick edit; a sent email is permanent, at list scale. That’s why banks, insurers, and any brand with a legal team run a real QA pass before every send. This is what that pass covers, written down, in the order most teams run it.

1. Copy against the deck

The copy deck is the approved source of truth. The email must say what it says: headline, body, CTAs, legal lines, disclaimers, offer terms, dates, and rates. Check both directions: every deck line present in the email, and no email line the deck never approved. On bilingual campaigns, run the pass separately for English and French; the most common miss is a French email quietly carrying an English fragment, or vice versa.

2. The creative, block by block

The email your developer built and the creative your client approved drift in small ways: different padding, a cropped hero, a missing module, steps out of order. Compare the rendered email against the approved PDF section by section, not as one long eyeball scroll. If a module in the creative has no counterpart in the email, that’s a finding, not a style choice.

3. Every link, and where it really goes

Click-tracking wrappers hide destinations, which is exactly why link QA fails silently: a link can carry the right label, resolve with a 200, and still land on the wrong page. Follow each tracked link through to its final URL and compare that destination against the deck’s links table. Also check: unsubscribe resolves, view-online resolves, UTM parameters follow the campaign convention, and nothing points at a staging host.

4. Accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA)

AA is the level procurement and regulators ask about by name. The email checks: contrast ratios on every text/background pair (legal text is the usual failure), meaningful alt text on every content image (“image” and “1” don’t count), a logical heading order, real table roles, and font sizes that survive mobile.

5. Rendering, especially Outlook

What renders in your browser is not what lands in Outlook’s Word engine. Check a real screenshot at desktop and mobile widths, then look specifically for Outlook risks: border-collapse seams, missing VML fallbacks, background images without a fallback color, and animated GIFs that strip to their first frame.

6. Spam and deliverability signals

Content-level checks before the send: image-to-text ratio, trigger phrasing, link-domain reputation, and authentication readiness. A campaign that lands in spam is a campaign that didn’t happen.

What humans consistently miss

• Line-level copy drift on the second language of a bilingual send
• Link destinations behind tracking wrappers (the label looks right)
• Contrast on fine print and footers
• The reminder email reusing a stale module from the launch version
• Anything checked at 4:55 PM on a Friday

The time this takes by hand

Multiply by languages, launch and reminder versions, and a round two after fixes, and one campaign becomes a working day of checking. That arithmetic is the whole reason SendLint exists: the same checklist, run in one automated pass, with a report you can hand to your developer and a certificate you can hand to your client.