Catch last season's URLs before this season's promo goes out
Promo emails are built by cloning the last one — and the clone inherits product links, discount landing pages and tracked banners from a campaign that already ended. SendProofs checks the delivered test of the new promo so retired pages and stale tracking surface before the send window, not in Monday's traffic report.
The moment this matters
Hours before a launch or sale send, working from a template cloned from the previous promo. The editor shows you the design; it cannot show you what the clone still carries: product URLs for items retired since last quarter, a discount landing page that expired with the old sale, a hero banner whose image path was cleaned up in the meantime, UTM values that still name the previous campaign. Manual QA — scanning the editor, spot-clicking a few products — covers the links you think about. The dangerous ones are the ones nobody thought about, because they came with the clone.
Who owns the decision
Whoever presses send on that calendar slot — a retention marketer, an ecommerce manager, whoever is on rotation for the promo. Theirs is the name on the send when the sale page 404s for the first wave of clicks, or when attribution reports come back filed under the wrong campaign name. Pressing send is a decision, and it deserves inputs.
The pre-send pass for a promo
-
Send the finished promo to yourself as a final test
After the last edit, from the platform — so links arrive rewritten and tracking is attached, exactly as recipients will get them.
-
Save the delivered email as a .eml file and upload it
Every unique product link, discount landing page, banner and remote image is extracted and deduplicated — a hero image repeated in three blocks is checked once.
-
Scan Broken first
In cloned templates, Broken usually means retired: a product page taken down, a sale URL that expired with the previous promo, an image path that no longer exists (remote image checks).
-
Then read the Warnings on tracking
UTM review runs on each link's final URL after HTTP redirects — duplicate keys, blank values and non-canonical casing are recorded per link, and the final UTM values are shown so a campaign name left over from the old promo is there to see (reviewing UTM tracking).
-
Fix in the template, send a fresh test, recheck
When every state is resolved or consciously accepted, the send window can open.
The evidence handoff
Promo calendars are team property, and so is the check. Note the results against the calendar entry or the launch checklist: when the delivered test was checked, what was fixed, what the recheck returned. The report stays in your workspace; the checklist line is what the person pressing send actually relies on — instead of assuming someone, at some point, clicked the hero banner. The pre-send QA checklist is a ready-made place for it.
A sample scenario
Sample data
A sale email cloned from the spring promo went out for its delivered test. One upload surfaced both problems the clone had smuggled in: the hero banner still pointed at img.campaign.example/spring/hero-final.png, a path retired when the old assets were cleaned up — 404, Broken — and the main sale link campaign.example/sale resolved but carried UTM_Campaign in non-canonical casing on its final URL — Warning. Both were fixed in the template, a fresh test was delivered, and the recheck cleared before the send window opened.
Limitations and non-goals
- Destination checks, not catalog checks: SendProofs verifies that a URL responds, not that the product is in stock, the price is right or the discount code applies at checkout.
- No rendering: it does not screenshot the email or judge how the banner looks. An image URL is checked for reachability and content type, with unexpected types recorded as a Warning.
- One delivered test at a time, from a file you upload. It does not watch the promo calendar or recheck sends on a schedule.
- Reachable at check time does not guarantee the page stays live through the whole sale — if the send slips by days, run the pass again.
Check the next promo before the window opens
Free workspace, no card at signup — upload the delivered test of your next sale email.