3 Ways To Test Before You Send

Your hard work and determination has paid off as you've created the perfect newsletter, excellent! Now comes an extremely important step before you’re ready to send; testing.

There are so many different email clients available to your subscribers these days and they all will potentially display your beautifully created newsletter in different, possibly design-breaking ways. This is why the testing phase of your email campaign is truly essential and it is imperative that you do not overlook this step.

So how can we test your newsletter within GraphicMail to make sure that it is getting received in the manner that you intended?

Preview

The first step to take would be to use the Preview section within the account, this will let you see the personalisation exactly as your subscribers will see it when it arrives in their inbox.

Simply select your newsletter and your mailing list and cycle through some of the contacts to make sure that it’s all looking great!

Email before the personalisation is populated.
 
Email within the Preview section showing the personalisation.

Send a Test

The next logical step would be to send a test (or a few tests) from within your account. Sending a test of the newsletter will not only give you another chance to see the personalisation in action but it will also allow you to make sure that the email is displaying correctly in the inbox.

Newsletter in the inbox.
 
We would recommend that you send your tests to a few different email addresses, preferably using an array of different email clients; Outlook, Gmail, iPhone, and any others that you want to test. This will enable you to make sure that it looks just as expected across all of these different platforms.

This is incredibly good practice and is a great habit to get into as it means that you’ll be able to see what the email displays like on real devices and see exactly what your subscribers will see before you do decide to send your newsletter.

Inbox Preview

Using the Inbox Preview tool, you can view what your newsletter will look like in over 30 different email clients, simply at the click of a button.

The Inbox Preview is completely free to use and is an exceptional way to preview exactly how your newsletter will display on the different email clients your subscribers could use ranging from desktop, mobile and web clients.

Here’s just a handful of the email clients tested within our Inbox Preview
 
It will take less than five minutes to populate from start to finish, and once it has you can then view the full email from any of the preview panes and note the changes that you may have to make in order to get it to display as designed across the board.

Note: all email clients render the newsletters in different ways and it will never look exactly the same, but using the Inbox Preview will save you time and help you to take steps to get as close as possible.

You’re Ready To Send

Once you have completed the three steps above, made any changes that you needed to make (if any), and you’re happy with how your newsletter is displaying across all of the platforms you have tested it on then you’re ready to send it out to your subscribers!

Using one of the 80+ free responsive templates available to all GraphicMail users will ensure that your newsletter will look great on any device, and they are therefore a great base to build your newsletter on. To try out any of our free responsive templates, sign up for a free no-obligation trial at; http://graphicmail.co.uk/get-your-free-trial.

The newsletter used in the screenshots of this blog are from our video tutorial which shows you how easy it is to create a fully responsive email in under 10 minutes using GraphicMail, and you can view that video on YouTube here.