Email can be a frustrating and – at times – a stressful medium. If you find something is wrong after you’ve hit send, it’s gone. You might have a few seconds to execute an emergency stop on your campaign, but once an email has reached your contact, you’ve no way of changing it.
This is the stressful part of the process. To alleviate this, get into the habit of testing!
Always Involve a Third Party
The first key piece of advice is always to involve someone else in your testing process. If you’re the only person responsible for all of the development stages of your campaign, you’ll be unable to step back and view things with the distance you need to pick up on minor errors.
Just like when writing copy, after you’ve re-written every sentence three times, it’s impossible to spot any typos.
A third party should be someone who has not been involved in creating the campaign in any way. You’ve been warned!
Create Test Lists
Your campaign-management tool will probably give you the option of creating one or several test lists. It is a sort of segment dedicated to testing. These lists can include the email addresses of different testers and potentially various inbox providers.
If you’re able to create several test lists, group them into types. As you’re likely to send several rounds of tests before everything’s perfect, don’t send your first test email to everyone. Begin with a small, restricted circle before sending to the people in charge of giving your email the final go-ahead.
Running Your Tests
You can break down testing into these categories:
1. Check Content
Ideally, you’ll have checked your content even before you move onto the campaign management stage. Once your email has been written and designed, it should get initial approval before moving onto the next stage. There’s nothing more frustrating than having to change the design once your HTML code has been done and you’re ready to send. It’s also a significant source of error, as it means redoing many of your production stages in a hurry.
2. Check Targeting
Targeting is, unfortunately, the hardest thing to test and mainly consists of seeing whether the volumes match up to what you expect before you send out your campaign (ideally, you’ll have estimated in the campaign brief).
Apart from asking a colleague to look at what you’ve done with the segmentation, there’s no easy way to carry out this check.
3. Check Rendering in Different Email Clients
As you’ve seen, different clients might not render (or display) HTML the same way. It’s essential to check that your email will arrive intact. You have two tools to help with this (mentioned before):
Even if you’ve already carried out these tests during the HTML coding stage, it’s a good idea to do them again in case any problems have arisen during the import to your campaign-management tool or while adding personalization variables.
4. Check Personalization and Conditional Blocks
One of the most complicated things to check before you finally hit send is all of the personalization you’ve added, especially your conditional blocks.
To do this, you’ll need to create test scenarios within your test lists.
Going back to the conditional block example linked to the ‘CONTACT_STATUS’ field, you should check that some test users have the client value in this field, whereas others have the prospective value or another value.
Let’s Recap!
Ask a third party to re-read your emails.
Create test lists that provide for the variables you’ve used in your conditional blocks and personalization.
Check the content of your emails before the campaign deployment stage.
Ask a colleague to look over your targeting and compare it to the volumes estimated in the brief.
We’ve now reached the end of part 3. Now that your campaign is sent, we’ll look at measuring and optimizing performance in part 4.
