Want More ROI From Your Multichannel Campaigns? Embrace a Robust QA Process

Multichannel campaigns are an essential marketing strategy to meet customers where they are, but they do increase the complexity of the build and launch process. With content spanning across email, social media, websites, mobile apps, and more, the potential for errors multiplies with each additional touchpoint. A robust quality assurance (QA) process isn't just nice to have — it's essential for maintaining brand integrity and ensuring campaign effectiveness.

At TELUS Digital, we've seen firsthand how a well-structured QA process can save brands from costly mistakes and reputation damage. Let's explore six key strategies to develop a QA process that scales with your marketing efforts and catches issues before they reach your audience.

1. Create a Foundational List with AI

Starting from scratch with QA can feel overwhelming, but by leveraging AI tools, a comprehensive initial checklist tailored to your specific campaign types can be a great way to create a foundation for your QA checklist. AI assistants can help identify standard elements that need verification across channels — from brand compliance and legal requirements to technical functionality and audience targeting parameters.

Take your QA checklist a step further by feeding your AI tool examples of past campaign issues to help it recognize patterns specific to your organization's common pitfalls.‍

2. Test All Elements of Your Campaigns with an Editable Checklist

The most effective QA processes leave nothing to chance. Create a living document that captures every element requiring verification.

Your checklist should include:

• Content accuracy: Spelling, grammar, messaging consistency
• Visual elements: Images, videos, animations, color consistency
• Functionality: Links, forms, buttons, user flows
• Data integration: Personalization fields, segment targeting
• Compliance: Legal requirements, accessibility standards
• Technical performance: Load times, rendering across devices
• Brand adherence: Logo usage, tone of voice, approved terminology, design system compliance

Make your checklist easily accessible and editable by all team members involved in the campaign process. Remember that often the most basic items are the ones that can easily slip through the cracks, so make sure you include every element, even the ones that feel most obvious.

3. Iterate and Enhance Your Process

Your QA process should evolve alongside your marketing capabilities and campaign enhancements. As you introduce new channels, technologies, campaign types, or even new standards or layers of personalization, your quality assurance needs will change.

After each campaign, conduct a brief retrospective to identify:

• What issues were caught during QA?
• What issues made it to production?
• What new elements should be added to your checklist?

A key to a successful QA process is constant refinement and documenting these learnings, so be sure to update your master checklist accordingly.

4. Test with Fresh Eyes

One of the most valuable QA techniques is involving someone unfamiliar with your campaign. When you've been immersed in campaign and process development, it becomes nearly impossible to spot certain issues.

Establish a buddy system where team members review each other's work, or create a dedicated QA role that remains separate from campaign creation. This fresh perspective will catch issues that campaign creators are blind to.

5. Automate Where Possible

As your campaigns scale, manual QA becomes increasingly time-consuming and prone to human error. Implementing automation can dramatically improve efficiency and accuracy.

Consider automating:

• Link validation across all campaign assets
• Email rendering tests across devices and clients
• Personalization field verification
• Image alt text and accessibility compliance
• Landing page load speed tests

Find balance by using automation to take on parts of the QA process that are repetitive or more technical, while preserving human review for more subjective elements such as tone, brand alignment, and overall user experience. AI assistants can now perform increasingly sophisticated QA functions, from checking grammar and tone consistency to identifying potential cultural sensitivity issues in your content.

6. Embrace Mistakes as Opportunities for Growth

Despite your best efforts, mistakes will occasionally slip through. Rather than viewing these as failures, treat them as valuable learning opportunities that strengthen your QA process.

When errors occur:

• Conduct a blameless post-mortem to understand how the issue escaped detection
• Document the specific failure point in detail
• Add new checkpoints to your QA process that would have caught this particular issue
• Share learnings across teams to prevent similar mistakes

Henry Ford once said, “The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.” So, taking an error as an opportunity to view your process with a fresh perspective could help identify blind spots you didn’t even know existed.

Building a Culture of Quality

Perhaps the most important element of an effective QA process isn't the tools or checklists — it's creating a culture where quality is everyone's responsibility. When team members understand the impact of errors on the customer experience and brand perception, they become more invested in the QA process.

By implementing these six strategies, you'll build a QA process that scales with your marketing efforts and provides peace of mind that your multichannel campaigns will launch flawlessly every time.