Email Testing For Quality Assurance and More

If we didn’t test our messages before sending them to our subscribers, I’d be in a lot of trouble! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had typos and broken links caught only by reviewing messages before sending.

Not only do we all make mistakes, but sometimes when we look at our work only from our own perspective, we don’t see the forest for the trees.

Testing can help with both problems. I’d like to briefly share a few ways successful email marketers test their messages, including benefits and limitations of each:

Method #1: Self-Testing

Try using a test feature to send your messages to a few of your own email accounts, possibly including software based email clients like Outlook and Thunderbird, as well as free web based ones like Yahoo! Mail and Gmail.

Benefit:

See your email messages much like your subscribers will in different email applications

Test links to make sure they direct to the desired page

Limitation:

Difficulty in taking a fresh, outside look at messages and their effectiveness.

Method #2: Recruit Your Friends and Colleagues

Discuss your campaign with helpful peers and ask them to provide feedback. Use the test feature, or for more complete feedback from a more realistic test, have them sign up for your email marketing campaign.

Benefit:

Collaboration: get a fresh set of eyes on the content of your messages and feedback on the broader goals of your campaign

Limitation:

A potentially narrow perspective: our friends are often more like us than our subscribers.

Method #3: Real World Testing

Once you have more than 100 people subscribed to your campaign, you can randomly segment and test to groups of your subscribers.

Results are in the form of measurable email analytics metrics such as open and click tracking rates, and if you make yourself approachable to subscribers, you’re bound to receive helpful feedback.

Benefit:

Test your hypothesis: learning from what does and doesn’t work helps you to keep your quality and results on an upward trend

Limitation:

Any type of measurement requires interpretation to get actionable insight.

We Need to Start Somewhere!

It’s true — we won’t get most things right 100% the first time, and testing helps you to take a step back to make improvements.

But we won’t get anywhere if we don’t start somewhere.

You know your business well, and you probably know enough about your subscribers to target them effectively. Start with your best shot, then use testing to hit the bullseye.

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