Eleven items that take five minutes and prevent 90% of 'oh no' production incidents. The checklist our team runs before hitting Send on any SFMC campaign.
After enough production incidents, every SFMC engineer internalizes a pre-send checklist. The ones we've hit personally:
Five minutes of checklist prevents most of these. Here's ours.
Dynamic Content Blocks only surface bugs when rendered against actual data. Preview with a Gold tier subscriber, a Silver subscriber, a brand-new subscriber. If any breaks, the real send will break for those groups.
The most common production break: %%FirstName%% field empty for a subset. Without Default Value, subscribers see Hi ,. Always preview against a subscriber with minimal data.
Outlook doesn't support many CSS properties. Background colors, some gradients, many layout tricks. If 20%+ of the audience uses Outlook, testing there is mandatory.
[DRAFT], [TEST], [APPROVAL] are marketer habits that slip into production. Configure Subject/Preheader Validation in Email Studio admin to block send if these strings appear - covered in a later post.
Every link - hero, every product card, footer social, unsubscribe. Click them. 404s happen. Broken unsubscribe is a compliance violation in some jurisdictions.
Wrong classification sends to the wrong audience. Commercial classification sends to marketing-opt-in subscribers; Transactional sends to everyone including unsubscribed (for order confirmations only).
Sending a promotional email with Transactional classification is an opt-out violation and damages sender reputation.
"Marketing Gold Tier" filter sounds right. Click into the DE - 12 rows? Your filter condition is wrong. 2.4M rows? You're about to send to everyone including unsubscribed. Visual check every time.
Expected 50k, showing 500k? Something else got included. Expected 50k, showing 1.2k? Filter stripped too much. Both warrant investigation before Send.
Some of these can be system-enforced:
But don't rely on automation alone. The checklist is the human layer that catches what the system doesn't.
If all eleven items take more than five minutes, the process is the problem:
Optimize the checklist, don't skip it.
New team members run the checklist supervised for their first five sends. After that, solo but audited weekly for the first month.
Pin the checklist in the team wiki. Print it and tape it over the Send button if needed.
Production email incidents are almost always preventable. The specific causes differ - typo, wrong audience, bad classification - but the cure is the same: a systematic pre-send checklist that a human actually runs. Five minutes per send. Zero marketers have regretted it.
Auditing SFMC send processes on client accounts? Our Salesforce team designs checklists and governance frameworks tailored to the team size and send volume on production engagements. Get in touch ->
See our full platform services for the stack we cover.
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