07/29/2021 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 07/29/2021 15:27
To send out a personalized customer email campaign, you've worked diligently with marketing and other departments to craft the perfect email message. You've gathered engaging creative, drafted compelling copy, segmented the ideal audience, and aligned all of your customer preferences and data points. But without a proven email testing plan in place, all of this work may come to a halt the moment you hit 'send.'
With the right email testing strategy, the end experience is no longer a guessing game. To reach the right subscriber, you need to understand why to test, what to test, and how to test your email marketing campaigns to ensure the best return on your investment and a stellar customer experience.
To clarify:, email testing can mean different things to different people. It can mean A/B testing two creative elements against one another to determine which performs best. But in this blog post, email testing is part of a quality assurance process to ensure a message renders correctly in the subscriber's inbox before hitting the send button.
Most email marketing veterans have embarrassing stories of moments when emails didn't go as planned. How many times have you received a 'Hello [First Name]' salutation? Simple testing could have revealed that the merge field wasn't set up properly.
If you look at email tests as a way to avoid pain, you can protect against moments like this. You won't have to guess how your email will appear to your subscribers.
Testing provides peace of mind, avoids bad customer experiences, creates foundations for program growth, and ultimately diverts the need from learning from mistakes to learning while creating.
Test the content of your emails in different email inbox environments before you send them. It not only helps you avoid bad experiences, it also becomes a strategic force to drive message optimization. As email marketing programs evolve, teams use more and more data to personalize at scale. This will give you the foundation to ensure these elevated experiences are received as intended.
In short, testing provides peace of mind, avoids bad customer experiences, creates foundations for program growth, and ultimately diverts the need from learning from mistakes to learning while creating.
To get started, use these three strategies for your email testing plan:
From Gmail to Outlook, mobile apps to international webmail clients, your subscribers can choose between hundreds of email clients - and each of them displays your HTML email a little differently. Your email might look perfect on your iPhone's mail app, but broken for subscribers reading in Outlook. Without a testing process that lets you preview email messages in the most popular reading environments, you risk sending broken emails to your audience.
When testing how emails appear in various email clients, keep in mind:
Pro tip: Ensure the email client your company uses is on your list. You want to ensure everyone in your organization (including your boss) has a great email experience.
How to test the content of emails on various clients and devices:
Your goal is to avoid data errors and personalization strings where code appears in the message instead of the personalization token - for example, 'Hi [First Name]' instead of 'Hi, Shannon.' Each customer should receive the images, copy, and personal information intended specifically for them.
To ensure email personalization is working:
How to test personalization fields:
Once the emails are sent, marketers need to track how they've performed to iterate and optimize for future success. What are the delivery and open rates? How did the journey perform? Testing is just one element to consider as you scale your email program. Report on email performance to align stakeholders to shared outcomes, drive business growth, and ensure successful personalization.
How to evaluate the results of your email marketing:
Every successful email program has a testing process in place. Whether you're creating manually or using tools built into your ESP for scale, you're building a better subscriber experience.
Get our playbook, 50 Email Best Practices for Email Marketers, for more email marketing tips you can use.