I once opened a brand's Klaviyo & found a competitor's UTM link inside their welcome email.
Customers were clicking "shop now" on a skincare brand & landing on a random pet supply store in another country.
This had been live for 4 months.
Nobody on the team had ever clicked the link to check.
The agency hadn't checked.
The founder hadn't checked.
The retention manager hadn't checked.
40k subscribers had received that email. Roughly 8k had opened it. A few hundred had clicked.
Every single one of them had a WORSE first impression of the brand than if the email had never been sent.
Here's the part that should make every ecom founder uncomfortable:
You have almost certainly never clicked a link in your own email program in the last 90 days.
You read the campaign in the preview before it goes out. You check the subject line. You scan the copy.
You don't actually open the email on your phone, tap the button, & sit through the customer experience your subscribers are paying for with their attention.
If you did, you'd find broken links, wrong images, expired discount codes, mobile formatting that breaks on iPhones, & in some cases UTM strings pointing to a brand you've never heard of.
The dashboard will NEVER tell you any of this.
Klaviyo will happily report 22% open rate & 1.8% click rate on an email that's sending half your traffic to a 404 page.
The fix is one habit.
Every Sunday night, sit on your couch, open your own email program from your customer's inbox, & click every single link.
Not the preview. The real email. On your phone. The way your customer reads it.
You'll find something broken within the first 4 emails. I have never audited an account where this wasn't true.