We can’t say it enough, and yet even the professionals don’t do it all the time. Testing is so important in email to make sure that every end-user sees the email campaign as it was intended to be delivered.
If a marketer created a print marketing piece and sent it to the printer but it didn’t come out right, they would pull it and have to start over. Email marketers don’t have the luxury of pulling it and starting over. Instead, we have to save-face by sending a corrected version (a rather humiliating email to send to any list size).
Rather than go through that process, take the extra steps to make sure you test your campaign in all email clients. Even if the majority of your recipients are only using Outlook 2003 or 2007, you might still have some subscribers on other email clients like Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail. Each email client seems to have a mind of its own too and reads HTML in different ways. Take a peak at Email Standards Project for insight on email client issues. And don’t just test it in email clients, test it in different browsers as well, and maybe even different screen resolutions (especially if you have a rather wide email being sent out).
Most email marketing systems offer a testing tool like Return Path Campaign Preview, so that you can quickly see how your campaign is rendering in different email clients. And now with mobile quickly becoming a popular way to read email, you should be testing that too. Check out DeviceAnywhere for your mobile testing needs.
Here are a few examples of what we’re talking about.
| Outlook 2003 version Correct rendering 
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vs. | Outlook 2007 version Bad rendering adds space 
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| Outlook 2007 version Bad rendering – no border  |
vs. | IE8 online version - Correct rendering with border  |
It doesn’t matter if sending to a list size of 100,000 or 100, every subscriber in that list deserves to receive the right version of the email campaign sent to them. As marketers we work hard on putting together great campaigns. Don’t ruin it by forgetting to test it out. We never know who might be receiving end, or who they’ll forward it to.
