With the upsurge in digital content, email marketing is on top. No other distribution channel drives engagement and builds customer relationships like email marketing. But how do you ensure that the email marketing campaign you have spent hours crafting looks the way you intended in your audience’s inbox?
The end experience should never be a guessing game. Subscribers could miss a key message or worst-case scenario is that your brand could be negatively impacted. It is therefore essential to adhere to a sound email marketing testing process.
There are two main causes that lead to issues with the rendering of emails. There are about 1,000 different email clients that businesses can choose from. Each of these displays your emails’ HTML differently. That means that your prospects and customers could see your marketing campaign through a variety of lenses. For instance, an email that looks perfectly fine on Gmail may not resolve properly on Microsoft Outlook and vice versa. To add to this complexity, people view emails on mobile devices, laptops, and tablets.
Below is our selection of the top 5 software which take the guessing game out of the end experience of your marketing emails.
#1 Salesforce – best for automation
Salesforce has partnered with Litmus to test the look of your marketing email in the top domains used by your subscribers, as well as checking how the email displays on the devices your subscribers use to check emails. Configure in Litmus which browsers, devices, and clients you want to preview. From the preview tab, you can click into Litmus and automatically see how your message appears across any email client. Pricey but can’t be beaten on features.
#2 Hubspot – best for inbound marketing
Hubspot email marketing tools allow you to quickly and easily create, personalize, and optimize your emails. The team at Hubspot have partnered with Litmus to allow you to preview the email on different devices, and from more than 80 email clients before sending.
#3 Mailchimp – best for startups
Mailchimp is geared toward startups since it’s flexible, affordable, and can grow with your business. It is best geared for email marketing at the most fundamental level.
Mailchimp’s preview mode is integrated with Litmus allowing you to get a screenshot of how your campaign will look in your recipients’ inboxes on both desktop and mobile. You can also send a test email to a group of recipients. Recipients can reply to the test email with their feedback.
#4 Sendinblue – best for SMS campaigns
Sendinblue allows you to easily manage your marketing campaigns, transactional emails, and SMS messages all in one simple and powerful platform. Enjoy the wealth of auto-responders and transactional email features.
You can easily review your campaign by previewing how your email may appear on various devices, screen sizes, and email providers. In addition, The SendinBlue test email feature allows you to send a test to your desired test recipients.
#5 Emma – best for personlization
Emma lets you send personalized messages to your customers based on your customer’s interactions with your company to help send relevant emails at the right time. With Emma, you can send automatically send the right email campaign to the right people depending on if they open an email or click on a certain link.
Before you hit the Send button, there is a built-in inbox preview tool to see exactly what your email will look like on a smartphone, tablet, and desktop. There is also the option to use the Litmus Inbox Preview to see how your email will look in dozens of the most popular email clients and devices.
To ensure successful rendering of email campaigns sending a test email is imperative. This will allow you to check your campaigns’ compatibility with different mail clients and responsiveness across device sizes.
Capturing feedback on your test emails can sometimes prove challenging. Some of the tools let you receive comments alongside the test email with a handy sidebar – but it can be tricky to see exactly what someone is referring to. The most basic alternative is for people to send their feedback via email.
At the time of writing this blog, we saw an announcement from PageProof that they now support online proofing of any email marketing tool that you might be using – very handy, especially given you can use it for all other marketing material too (and video). We haven’t seen email proofing like this offered by other online proofing tools. We did find a video on how this works here too.