We live in a highly digital world today where emails are the fastest and simplest way to market your online services or products. Your potential customers receive all your marketing emails on different email clients such as Outlook, Gmail, or Yahoo, and absolutely each client renders them differently. There’s a chance that you may lose your potential customers because of all these variations.
Unfortunately, email programs and applications can easily break your design, subject links, butchering links, images, and much more. And this is where the use of a powerful email testing tool might come in handy. In this post, we’ll take a deeper look at the necessity to test your emails and review the main reasons you need to do this.
Broken Links
When your email messages contain links, they are usually masked behind a button or a hyperlink, and this makes it difficult to check them before sending with a quick look. Moreover, it is clear that to click through them all is a time-consuming task.
If you don’t want to send your users to a 404 page, all links have to be tested before sending. You have two options to choose from - do this manually to make sure your links lead to the right landing page or use an email testing tool. In doing so, you’ll quickly check if all your links go to the right spot.
Spelling and Grammar Errors
After you send an email, there’s no undo button (unfortunately). It goes without saying that when emails include spelling or grammar errors, this mistake can surely influence your reputation. Although minor grammar and spelling mistakes can be left unnoticed by your subscribers, there are a few easy steps that allow you to avoid these issues.
Firstly, you have to proofread your messages before sending them. Secondly, if it’s an important and expensive marketing campaign, you should have a fresh set of eyes (proofreaders) that will also check it for errors.
Plus, you can also use Microsoft (News - Alert) Word, Grammarly, or Notepad; these tools will highlight all spelling mistakes.
Missing Plain Text Version
Some emails have an HTML version and a plain text version and both have to be tested. That’s why your first and foremost task is to check if you have removed placeholder content and updated the copy (in case any changes to the HTML version were made).
Besides, you must also check the links in your plain text version and HTML version. You need to make sure they are going to the right landing page. Grammar or spelling mistakes should also be removed.
Remember that ASCII characters (copyright, trademark, various quotes) aren’t supported in plain text. If you don’t properly check it, these characters may be corrupted in your plain text. You can either do a manual test or use a powerful email checking tool.
Check the Images to Make Sure They Are Properly Rendered
When testing your emails, you’ll also check if all your images are rendered correctly. The thing is that some email clients block images and sometimes, marketing emails that include a few images may be filtered to the spam folder. To prevent this from happening, you have to test this across different clients. In doing so, you’ll check how your images are demonstrated on the chosen email clients and whether they influence the general performance.
Checking the Subject Lines
Subject lines are frequently neglected by users but they are also of prime importance for marketing campaigns. However, the main goal of subject emails is to check where your email will land: inbox or a spam folder? If the behavior of your potential customers varies, then the opening rate of your email will also vary. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to test the same subject line for marketing emails that were delivered to a varied test audience.
Damaged Dynamic Content
If your emails contain dynamic content, you must also test it. In doing so, you’ll make sure your ESP’s merge/personalization tags are running properly and demonstrate correct data. Moreover, you should also check if the fallbacks are in the right place (in case there’s no subscriber data).
There’s one more thing that must be checked. If you don’t want your targeted audience to receive emails that begin with “Dear %%first_name%%, you need to test switched ESPs. The thing is that they frequently come with various merge tags and they must be tested in order to make sure your dynamic content is running properly. To do this, you need to send your tests from your ESP.
Test the Date and Time of Sending
You can’t leave this important component not tested. If your main objective is to run a powerful offer campaign, you have to choose the right time to send your emails to your users. To achieve that goal, you need to segment users based on activity time, age, etc.
For instance, you have different segments of users. Some of them are most active during the day, whereas others - at night. And if you send your offer campaign to users that are more active at night during the daytime, this offer will be invalid when they decide to use it. That’s why you need to think carefully about this issue and avoid such mistakes.
Blue Links on iOS-Powered Devices
Sometimes, addresses, phone numbers, or dates may be highlighted in blue on iPhones or iPads. In some instances, they trigger various events, and these may be useful in some cases. But if you aren’t going to provide users with information about such events, these blue links look like a nuisance and may even ruin your reputation.
To prevent this from happening, you need to test your marketing emails in different clients to make sure that all these links are fixed.
Overall, when you test your emails in different webmail and mobile inboxes, you’ll surely find critical issues that influence the general performance of your emails. Test your emails every time and you’ll be doubly sure that your emails won’t look strange in the inboxes of your potential or standing customers.
