Raise your hand if you’ve ever launched an email marketing campaign without proper testing. Don’t worry, it has happened to all of us. All of a sudden you have to launch a new campaign with persona-targeted blocks, and you only have minutes to execute. Oh boy. You quickly edit your template, proof the copy, and send a test email to someone else in the room as well as yourself. But is that enough of a test?
You calculate how much time you’d have to spend on proper persona tests: too much. So you drop the idea and read through the test email one more time. It seems fine, so you hit the launch button. What could possibly go wrong?
However, your subscribers have different devices, and they use different email clients on various browsers. A customer may receive the same message on multiple devices or platforms, but if the message displays differently on those devices, your customer might get confused. Your emails might look strange in some inboxes without you ever noticing. Designers and marketers put huge effort into email campaigns, so it would be very unpleasant to mess up simply because of technical details.
In this article, we will share a few tips on how you can check to make sure your emails will be optimized for different rendering engines. So, let’s eliminate the fear you feel when you hover your cursor over the send button. First of all, let’s break down your email or automated email campaigns into three parts: awareness, consideration, and conversion.
Awareness: The First Impression
Make sure the sender’s name and the subject line (the first things your subscriber will see) don’t contain spelling errors. Ensure that the sender’s name is easy to recognize and you are not using reply-to addresses and “no-reply”, because it looks spammy. Also, don’t use your internal name for the email campaign as the subject line, and if you’re using any “emojis” or special characters, verify that email clients support those characters.
Consideration: Deliver Great Experience
Images play a big role in a message’s appearance; however, not everyone will see them in your emails. Mainly for security reasons, email clients vary in how they handle or even block images. Blocking your CTA button and pictures can seriously decrease the CTR on your campaigns. ALT text (alternative text, which shows up in place of a blocked image) could be your last hope. Make sure your ALT text contains no typos and it’s appropriate for the image it’s representing.
With multi-language campaigns, you might have unexpected difficulties. English is a very compact language, and text translated from English will typically be longer in the translation than the original. Even if you have an amazing template, longer text can cause problems in your layout.
For instance, the CTA button you wanted to show right after the lead and without scrolling even on mobile devices may crawl lower if the translation makes the lead text longer. Different language variations should be tested if you want all of your subscribers to enjoy the same experience.
Conversion: The Most Important Aspect
This is the most important aspect for your business. Remember, the whole email marketing buzz is about taking your subscribers to a certain website. Ensure your conversion funnel is lined with proper links!
However, even though we like highlighted links, they can impact the design of your email in some cases. On iPhone and iPad devices, phone numbers, addresses, dates and some individual words frequently turn out blue and underlined. Even worse, your links could be broken, untracked or simply incorrect. Usually, links are masked behind an image, button or hyperlink. Clicking through every single link before the launch is a smart idea, but burns a lot of time. It would be best if your email editor has a checklist, which verifies all your links, double-checks your tracking terms and verifies if the page you’re linking to actually loads.
So who will provide you this checklist? Who helps you to see your email’s appearance on various devices and inboxes? How can you save an enormous amount of time on email testing? Emarsys B2C Marketing Cloud has already integrated the market-leading email testing solution from Litmus.
With a single click, your teams can quickly and efficiently test, analyze and monitor your campaigns to ensure a quality subscriber and brand experience. Powered by Litmus, we provide instant previews in 50+ email clients, as you go. Every change you make updates your previews in real time, so you can build and troubleshoot faster than ever before.
Final Thoughts
You spend a lot of time planning and building your email marketing campaigns, but sometimes you have to move faster than you’d like, which opens you up to mistakes. If you get the sender’s name wrong or your subject line has a couple typos, you may have blown your chance to win that customer over.
Even if you make an excellent first impression, it might not matter much if the user experience is clunky, the page has an inconsistent appearance on different devices, or your CTA button doesn’t appear on the page the way you intended. That may be the difference between conversion and failure. However, the solution is to test your email campaigns before they’re released into the world, and you don’t need a degree in SEO to accomplish that. You need a partner like Emarsys who will do it for you and do it right every time.
Learn more about Emarsys’ B2C Marketing Cloud and how we can help you turn contacts into loyal customers.
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