Not testing email will result in reduced click rates, wrong information, broken links, and/or spoiled content style resulting in damage to the company brand.
According to Email on Acid “Many marketers do ad-hoc testing on just a couple clients or devices. Maybe they pop off a quick test to their Outlook.com account and their iPhone, and call it good. They blithely hit send, oblivious to the fact that their email had Unwanted Gaps in Outlook or that Gmail is clipping their email. That’s why testing email campaigns in a variety of clients and devices before sending is crucial to the success of the email campaigns.” (1)
Suppose a marketing department has a list of 50,000 subscribers and it just sent out an email campaign promoting the hottest, newest feature that was estimated to bring in $10,000 in new sales. Yesmail, a metrics tool, reported that 30% of consumers now read their email exclusively on mobile devices (2). If an email is sent that looks distorted on an iPhone, that means 15,000 people on the list are looking at a janky email. If 15,000 people are looking at that broken email and wondering if the company is credible, there is a potential to lose $3,000 out of the $10,000 predicted for revenue.
It is not just for mobile devices. Some of the email clients like Outlook and Gmail also eat email scripts and style and make email creepy.
Email testing is a major task to perform before launching email campaigns. It needs a series of devices and needed to perform the test on different platforms. To create a testing suite would take weeks creating new accounts in email clients like Lotus Notes, Outlook, Gmail, Office 365, Outlook.com, Thunderbird, AOL, Apple Mail, and so on! Then, imagine how long it would take to log into every single client/device/account and review the emails. Sharing these previews and troubleshooting would not be a walk in the park either. On top of that, there would be thousands of dollars spent buying all the Kindles, Androids, and iPhones needed to exhaustively test the email on mobile devices.
The email testing services are the best option for this. The only need is to buy the subscription of these services and one-click tests the email code and design in a better way.
If emails fall into the spam folder, are viewed as ‘promotion’ by Gmail or just never reach the inbox of the prospects, it doesn’t matter how good the subject line and copy are; deliverability issues will severely limit the potential of the email marketing program. Most email marketing platforms will only flag big deliverability issues. It is a good idea to be proactive and do occasional spot-checks.
Here are some platforms with their specifications:
Rightwave can help with every aspect of digital marketing. Contact RightWave for more Information.
References:
- Melanie Graham, “The Cost of Not Testing an Email”, Email on Acid: September 21, 2018, https://www.emailonacid.com/blog/article/email-marketing/the-cost-of-not-testing-an-email/
- Etienne Garbugli: “19 Email Testing Tools to Make Your Campaigns Successful Before They Start”, Highlights, July 27, 2018, https://www.gethighlights.co/blog/email-testing-tools/
