How To Test Your Email Marketing Campaigns
Measure twice, send once to avoid embarrassing problems
Before you send your HTML email campaign to your entire subscriber list, you should do some testing. MailChimp lets you send tests to yourself, but do you know what to look for? Here are some handy tips for testing your email campaigns...
- Don't just rely on our pop-up preview. That's a rough approximation of how your email would look, in the best of circumstances. You need to actually deliver your campaign to real email addresses to see how it works "in the wild."
- Setup email accounts with as many email services as possible (it's usually free). Use the most common services, like MSN, Hotmail, Yahoo!, and Gmail. You might also setup an account with AOL.
- Don't change any of the default settings for those accounts. Don't add yourself to the address book, or anything. You'll want to test whether or not your email campaigns get spam-filtered to a typical email account.
- Setup a "test list" in MailChimp (you can do this in one click by replicating your "real" list) and import these test addresses.
- Try to recruit co-workers, friends, or family to become testers for you. That way, they can tell you how your email looks in all the different email programs. If you have the resources, setup a testing computer in the office with multiple operating systems and email programs (here's a checklist of email programs that we test on at MailChimp).
- On your signup form, are you giving users the option to receive the plain-text only version of your emails? If so, be sure to signup one of your test emails to receive plain-text only.
- Send as many emails as you can to your test addresses.
- Did your campaign end up in the junk folder for any of the email accounts? If so, check your email campaign for "spammy" content.
- Most email programs leave images turned off by default (you have to click a link or button to display images). How does your email look with images turned off? That's the first impression people will have.
- Do you have "Alt-text" coded for your images, to entice recipients to click the "show images" button (Alt-text is the "alternative text" that's displayed when an image can't be seen in a web browser or email program)? When we say, "entice" we don't mean you should resort to spammy, salesy text like, "CHECK THIS OUT!" Sometimes, a really descriptive alt-text is enticing enough: "Screenshot of the new feature we just launched"
- Just in case people don't want to show your images (like if they're paranoid about their privacy), do you have a link at the top of your email, allowing them to view your message online, in their browser?
- When you click "show images" for your email, do all the images work? Do they download fairly quickly, or do you need to go back and optimize them?
- Click on as many links as possible (yes, this is mind-numbing, but necessary). Do they all work? Are there any broken links?
- Did you enable click or open tracking in MailChimp? If so, click and open some of your emails. Log in to MailChimp and check your campaign stats. Everything working properly?
Other Useful Resources:
- Free Email Marketing Guide
- Inbox Inspector: Generate screenshots of your email designs in all the major email programs, test all the major spam filters and email firewalls, and scan for spammy keywords in one click.
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