Marketers must preview and test their email campaigns before sending them. This helps ensure the email design displays as expected in the subscribers’ inboxes, and that it offers the best possible user experience. Email testing is also a great way to make sure customized elements, such as personalized and dynamic content, are working correctly.
Before hitting the “Send” button, test that your email looks good on all devices. But devices are not the only thing to think about. You should also make sure that your email marketing renders well across the major email clients (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo!…).
How to test an email before sending it
To preview your campaigns before sending them to your email list, choose an email marketing software offering the following testing functionalities:
- Use an inbox preview tool to avoid manual testing and save time by previewing the email you want, on the email client and device you want. This is something you should perform before any email is sent – email clients have updates and a template that works fine today perhaps won’t be looking as good tomorrow.
- If you’ve designed dynamic sections in your email content based on segments, test the conditional display. You can select to “display the entire email” or to “display by segment” to preview your campaign as recipients will see it, depending on which segment they belong to.
- If you’re using transactional email templates, make sure to preview them with real values. With an email preview mode, you can see your template the exact same way it will look like for one of your recipients.
Result
Testing and previewing the campaign you’ve designed in multiple ways will help ensure it displays as expected in your subscribers' inboxes.
