How one can check emails earlier than you ship them

By Pam Neely July 12, 2022

Don’t lose subscribers due to errors in your emails! Right here’s easy methods to keep away from cringe-worthy errors.

Do not forget that cringe-worthy second when Steve Harvey learn the mistaken title for the winner of Miss Universe?

Don’t be like Steve. Keep away from errors in entrance of a big viewers by testing emails earlier than you ship them.

This doesn’t take quite a lot of time – perhaps 5 to 10 minutes. It is going to preserve you from embarrassing your self and annoying your subscribers. One dangerous expertise may be sufficient to show a subscriber away for good.

However when you do unintentionally pull a Steve Harvey and mess up? It occurs. Don’t let the worry of constructing a mistake preserve you from sending your emails. You may at all times ship an apology e mail.

The 2 most typical sorts of e mail advertising and marketing errors

There are two sorts of errors we see in emails.

1. Human errors: lacking phrases, typos, mistaken dates, damaged hyperlinks, or outdated information 
2. Show errors: variations in message look throughout e mail shoppers

Fortunately, each of most of these errors may be prevented.

How one can keep away from human errors in e mail messages

Let’s say you ship an e mail selling your new product.

The open price is wonderful: Greater than 60% of your subscribers opened the e-mail! Greater than 30% of people that opened the hyperlink clicked via to see your product!

You begin celebrating . . . till the replies out of your subscribers begin rolling in. 

“The hyperlink doesn’t work.”

“Unhealthy hyperlink.”

“You included the mistaken hyperlink.”

“I can’t discover the touchdown web page!”

“I wished to purchase it, however after I clicked, it confirmed an error message.”

You forgot to replace your e mail with the brand new product hyperlink. 

You rapidly ship out one other e mail with the proper hyperlink. However by now, you’ve most likely misplaced a big portion of subscribers who clicked via in your first e mail. As soon as the hyperlink didn’t work, they moved on, taking their potential sale with them.

We want this was a faux state of affairs, however we see it occur on a regular basis. Some weeks, we get so many emails with damaged hyperlinks we marvel if perhaps it isn’t some sort of misguided tactic individuals strive simply to get extra clicks from their emails (there are higher methods to get extra clicks).

Right here is an instance of a damaged hyperlink apology e mail:

Luckily, there’s a confirmed approach to keep away from sending apology emails. It’s known as a “pre-flight guidelines.”

How one can use an e mail pre-flight guidelines

We’ve a pre-flight guidelines at AWeber and we use it for each e mail we ship. We prefer it a lot, we’ve included an tailored pre-flight guidelines under that you need to use to check emails earlier than sending.

It’s easy to make use of: Earlier than you ship any e mail, pull up this guidelines and browse it via. Verify that each merchandise on the record has been checked.

This does, clearly, add a number of extra steps to getting your emails out. However the payoff is large: No extra errors in emails. Much less nervousness about sending your emails.

Your e mail pre-flight guidelines

1. Learn your e mail out loud. (Or have your pc learn your e mail out loud to you.) It will assist you hear the place your writing would possibly want some fine-tuning and it’ll assist you discover typos or lacking phrases. It will probably additionally assist you test the tone and the content material of your e mail.
2. Ship a check e mail to a few individuals you belief and who aren’t afraid to present you an sincere critique. They provide a contemporary pair of eyes which will catch one thing you didn’t.
3. If it’s a advertising and marketing e mail, verify the e-mail has a transparent call-to-action that the reader ought to take, whether or not that’s a buying web page, a weblog put up, a registration web page, and many others?
4. Paste the copy of your e mail into the free model of Grammarly to verify there aren’t any typos or different copy errors. Additionally paste the topic line and preheader in to substantiate there aren’t any errors.
5. Ship a check model of the e-mail to your self.
6. View the check e mail on each a desktop and on a cell system like your telephone.
7. When you’ve got a big record (over 2,000 subscribers) or in case your emails have a posh structure or are utilizing superior coding like AMP, test how your e mail shows in an e mail testing device (see under for extra data).
8. Click on on each single hyperlink within the e mail – together with linked photos. (Luckily, when you don’t catch the typo in your URLs, AWeber’s automated hyperlink checker inside our message editor will. You’ll see a purple exclamation level pop as much as inform you the hyperlink is damaged. If the URL is legitimate, you’ll see a inexperienced checkmark.)
9. If you click on on every hyperlink, confirm your monitoring hyperlinks are working appropriately (when you’ve added monitoring codes)
10. Verify that you just’ve included alt-text on your photos. Why? Different textual content seems within the place of a picture. Many e mail companies will disable photos in messages, and a few customers flip them off all collectively. Alt-text permits the consumer to know what was meant to be there. It’s additionally useful for any of your subscribers which may be visually impaired.

BONUS: When you’ve got time, get your e mail arrange, then go do one thing else for an hour or so. If you come again to it with contemporary eyes, you’ll discover stuff you may need in any other case missed.

How one can keep away from show errors in e mail messages

In an ideal world, all e mail companies would show emails the identical approach. There could be no default setting to dam photos, or funky modifications to the colour of your textual content. You wouldn’t have to fret about your e mail content material getting clipped, and also you wouldn’t have to check emails earlier than sending.

However e mail companies don’t show all emails the identical approach. ☹️

In e mail advertising and marketing lingo, how e mail messages show in several e mail shoppers known as “rendering.” So you might have heard these show errors known as “rendering errors” up to now.

No matter the issue, we should ensure that our emails show appropriately for all of our subscribers — no matter the place they select to host their inbox.

The easiest way to take action? By testing emails earlier than sending them to subscribers.

Check your emails earlier than sending

Previewing your emails earlier than sending them to your record lets you view your e mail out of your subscriber’s perspective: in an inbox much like theirs out of your desktop or cell system.

That is simple to do in AWeber. To ship a check message to your self (or to anybody else), simply click on the Preview & Check” button within the higher right-hand nook while you’re within the Message Editor.

Then enter your e mail handle (or the e-mail handle of whomever you wish to ship the check e mail to) within the subject on the subsequent web page:

Be aware that within the view above, we’ve turned the “Cell preview” on, so we’re viewing an approximation of how the e-mail would look in a cell system.

Simply taking that further step is a good begin. It’s greater than many senders do. Nevertheless, merely sending a check model of an e mail to your self and viewing it in your favourite e mail account isn’t sufficient when you’ve bought a big record, or if you wish to ensure your emails render appropriately.

Why’s that? As a result of when you solely view your e mail in a single e mail consumer earlier than sending, you don’t understand how that e mail will show for subscribers that open it in a unique e mail consumer.

Typically emails can render very in a different way in several e mail shoppers. For instance, say you’re utilizing fancy fonts in your emails. Right here’s how an e mail with an uncommon font would possibly show in Gmail:

and right here’s how that very same e mail would render in Outlook:

The fonts are totally different, however the buttons additionally look very totally different. And you may guess what a disabled button can do to click-thru charges…

Rendering variations may also trigger photos to get cut-off, misplaced textual content or worse.

Luckily, there are two e mail testing strategies to handle this:

1. Create totally different e mail addresses and ship emails to your self.

Managing a wide range of e mail addresses could not sound interesting, nevertheless it’s a superb (and free!) approach to test how your subscribers will see your emails of their inbox.

When utilizing this technique to check emails earlier than sending, it’s necessary to view your emails in a wide range of e mail shoppers, and with a wide range of gadgets. So that you would possibly wish to arrange accounts on a number of e mail shoppers like Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook. Then view the emails despatched to every of these e mail shoppers through totally different gadgets, like a desktop, a telephone, and an iPad or comparable system. Then strive viewing your emails utilizing darkish mode.

This works — and it’s free — however you’ll be able to most likely see how this may get fairly time-consuming. It may simply take longer to test your e mail than it did to jot down it and lay it out!

2. Use a third-party device to check and preview your emails throughout totally different shoppers.

Whereas an amazing begin, the primary testing technique — creating e mail addresses for the highest e mail shoppers — may be inaccurate when you ship quite a lot of e mail.

So chances are you’ll wish to strive a paid e mail testing service. With an e mail testing device, you’ll be able to see at a look how your e mail will render throughout quite a few e mail shoppers and gadgets unexpectedly.

At AWeber, we use Litmus to check our emails. Within the screenshot under, you’ll be able to see how Litmus allow you to see emails on a number of shoppers, through a number of gadgets, with a number of settings, in minutes.

Though Litmus is an effective match for us, you would possibly like one other e mail testing device like E-mail on Acid or Previewmyemail.

A pre-flight guidelines and a workable e mail testing plan are all it’s good to check emails earlier than sending

In order that’s easy methods to by no means should ship one other apology e mail once more. Simply:

• Use a pre-flight guidelines
• Use an e mail testing device (or make up your individual)

Your pre-flight guidelines doesn’t should be fancy. Select which steps you are feeling are important, then let go of the remainder. Some e mail senders even print out their guidelines and preserve it by their work station. Any time they’ve an e mail to ship, they only breeze via their record, then click on “Ship.”

Your e mail testing device additionally doesn’t should be overcomplicated. Should you’ve bought a small record and also you’re quick on time, checking your emails in certainly one of two e mail shoppers in your telephone and in your laptop computer is likely to be advantageous. It will depend on what number of sources you might have, and on how excellent you need your emails to be.

Right here’s a secret professional trick that may assist you keep away from e mail errors, too: Use a pre-designed template. Templates have been rigorously checked to verify they’ll render nicely in each main e mail consumer. As long as you don’t fiddle with the e-mail template an excessive amount of, you’ll be able to belief your emails will look good when you use a template. And when you do wish to alter a template (and also you’re an AWeber buyer) we provide an reasonably priced template customization service.

Now it’s your flip: What’s your excellent e mail pre-flight guidelines? Have you ever been utilizing a guidelines up till now? Would you spend cash on an e mail testing device, or is the “free model” we defined ok for now? How will you check emails earlier than sending after studying this?

Tell us within the feedback.