A campaign QA pass is not a personality trait — it is a checklist. The teams that ship cleanly week after week run the same six checks in the same order. Here is ours.
1. Rendering across inboxes
Test in Outlook, Gmail web, Gmail mobile, Apple Mail, and at least one corporate Outlook setup. Dark mode is not optional — your logo will invert.
2. Every link
Click every link in the rendered preview, not just the source. Verify that destination URLs include the right UTMs and resolve. Dead links in a launch email cost more than ten hours of additional QA.
3. Tracking and consent
Confirm GTM fires correctly on the landing page, consent is captured before any non-essential tag loads, and the form posts to the right campaign.
4. Segmentation
Sanity check the audience: row count, suppression overlap, and a random sample of three records. Most send disasters are segmentation disasters.
5. Sync direction
If the campaign updates a field that flows to Salesforce, validate the sync end-to-end on at least one test record before send.
6. Reporting wired
If you cannot answer 'how is this campaign performing' the morning after launch, the dashboard is the bug — not the campaign.