Top 10 Email Testing Best Practices
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Reading Time: 6 min
Have you ever sent out an email campaign only to realize that it didn’t look quite right or ended up in the spam folder? Email testing is the secret weapon for marketers aiming for flawless email campaigns. It ensures that your emails look great and function correctly across all devices and email clients.
Recently a study was conducted to find out the percentage of email receivers who report an email to be spam just by reading the subject line. Astonishingly, it was 69%, which is huge.
Businesses should start using a mail tester to detect any issues in their email before they become a major problem. By doing so, email deliverability improves along with your email’s engagement rate.
With that said, let’s dive into the best practices that you can follow for email testing.
Key Takeaways
- Email testing is essential to ensure campaigns look great and function correctly across all devices and email clients.
- Verifying links and calls to action within your emails is crucial to prevent reduced engagement rates due to broken links.
- Checking for spam triggers is vital to ensure that legitimate emails avoid being filtered into spam folders.
- Conducting inbox placement tests is important to confirm that emails reach the recipient’s primary inbox rather than getting lost in spam.
- A/B testing subject lines can significantly improve open rates and increase the effectiveness of email campaigns.
1. Test Across Multiple Devices and Email Clients
The very first thing you need to do is test your email on different devices and email clients. Sometimes emails that may look perfect on a Desktop, might not look that good on a mobile device.
Around 61.9% of emails are opened using a mobile phone so it’s crucial to ensure that your email is compatible on a smaller screen.
How to Do It
You can use different tools to check whether your email is looking good on multiple devices or not. Also, ensure that your email design is responsive and adjusts well to different screen sizes. Look for any issues in layout, font size, or the images you used.
2. Verify All Links and CTAs
Now look for any broken links and non-functional CTAs that could cause problems for the reader. This can reduce your engagement rates as well if not sorted out. Your only goal should be to make it as easy as possible for the recipients to take the desired action.
According to Saleslion, emails with a single CTA increased clicks by 371%.
How to Do It
You should click on every link in your email to ensure they are redirecting you to the correct destinations. This includes buttons, hyperlinked text, and images. Test links in different environments to ensure they’re functioning properly on all the different platforms.
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3. Check for Spam Triggers
Email clients like Gmail and Yahoo provide spam filters to protect users from potentially harmful messages. However, they can also block your legitimate emails if they do not meet their sender requirements, which will eventually reduce your reach.
In 2023, Approximately 45% of all emails were identified as spam.
How to Do It
Closely follow Google and Yahoo’s updated email sender requirements and track your compliance using postmaster tools. You can use a mail tester tool to scan your emails for common spam triggers. Just avoid using excessive capital letters, exclamation marks, and spammy words like “free,” “buy now,” or “urgent.”
4. Conduct Comprehensive Inbox Placement Testing
It’s not enough for your emails to just be delivered, they must land in the recipient’s primary inbox, not the spam or quarantine folders. It’s a universal fact, and even studies support this claim that the emails that land in the primary inbox have significantly higher open rates.
How to Do It
For this you need to send your email to various test accounts and that too to different ISPs to see where it lands. You can use different tools to accomplish this as well. Keep an eye on where your emails are landing to identify any potential issues in delivering the email.
5. A/B Test Subject Lines
The subject line is the most crucial part of the email as that’s the only part the recipient sees. If you use a compelling and attractive subject line, you can significantly increase your email’s open rates. According to Mailchimp, A/B testing can improve open rates by 29%.
How to Do It
What you need to do is create around five subject lines and send them to small segments of your audience. Now watch all these campaigns and analyze which one is performing the best. You should create emails of variable lengths, tones, and techniques to make them more personal for the reader.
Lastly, whichever performs the best, use that subject line for all your emails.
6. Review Content and Grammar
When you’re done with your email, read it out loud so you can identify any potential grammar issues. Any errors in your email decrease your credibility and question whether you’re a professional or not.
Recently Website Planet examined over 5,000 site visits and found that pages with typos experienced an 85% higher bounce rate compared to those without errors.
How to Do It
To make it easier to check grammar and content, you can use tools like Grammarly or Hemingway. Check for spelling errors, grammatical mistakes, and readability. You must ensure that your content is clear, concise, and error-free.
7. Check Load Times for Images
If the images in your email are loading slowly, your readers will lose interest and just leave your email or maybe even report it as spam.
Your emails’ image load time should be significantly quick. In the present scenario, we humans have a very low attention span. According to research, 53% of mobile users leave a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load – hence the same should apply to emails as well.
How to Do It
To solve these issues you can start by optimizing your images so the loading time is decreased. However, don’t compromise on quality, in this process. The images you use should be in JPEG or PNG format. You can then test the load time of your emails by using various online tools like Litmus.
8. Verify Personalization Tokens
Another way to boost engagement is personalization. It means using first names to address the reader so they feel valued. However, if your emails have incorrect tokens, they can look unprofessional.
How to Do It
Like previous points, you need to test your emails before sending them out. In this case, you’ll be checking if the personalization tokens are placed correctly like the recipient’s name. You can use placeholder data to verify that the tokens work as you planned. Keep an eye out for common issues like missing or incorrect data.
9. Ensure Accessibility
Your emails should be accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities. By doing so you get a wider reach.
How to Do It
You should use alt text for images, proper HTML structure, and ensure a high contrast between text and background colors so the text is easily readable. The texts you use for your links and buttons should be clear and descriptive so it’s easy for the audience to read and understand them.
10. Monitor Deliverability Rates
Last but not least, you need to keep an eye on deliverability rates. If your emails have a high bounce rate, it can damage your sender reputation and reduce future deliverability. A poor sender reputation can also cause your emails to be considered spam.
How to Do It
To improve deliverability, you must regularly clean your email list to remove inactive or invalid addresses. You can also use double opt-in methods to ensure your subscribers genuinely want to read your content. Monitor your bounce rates like a hawk and make necessary changes to improve them.
Summing Up
By using a comprehensive mail testing tool, you can cover all these practices in one go. The most important email testing technique that would help you is A/B testing. This shows the best-performing emails so you can put all your investment into that one successful campaign.
There’s no specific pattern that works for everyone. You can try out things your way and find out which one works best for you.
For businesses needing help securing their emails and improving deliverability, there is PowerDMARC. We provide SaaS email authentication managed services so you can comply with your mailbox provider’s sender rules and boost your email security with time.
Book a Demo with one of our domain security experts to learn more!
Domain & Email Security Expert at PowerDMARC
Ahona is the Marketing Manager at PowerDMARC, with 5+ years of experience in writing about cybersecurity topics, specializing in domain and email security. Ahona holds a post-graduation degree in Journalism and Communications, solidifying her career in the security sector since 2019.
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