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.

We understand the importance of keeping your account safe which is why we have now introduced a new 2-Factor Authentication process when logging into your account. Although it is not vital for you to use this new feature, we would strongly recommend it as it will help to strengthen the security of your account.

There are 2 options when using the new authentication process:

Option 1 is email which will send a verification PIN code to the email address related to your account (username).
Option 2 is SMS which will use the mobile number assigned to your user profile and send a text message to you displaying the verification PIN code.

Once you have the PIN code, simply enter it into the textbox to finalise your login:


If turned on within the settings of your account, you will not be required to 2-factor authenticate every time you log in. You will only be required to authenticate once every 30 days or when you use a new browser/device to access your GraphicMail account.

Please note: The 2-factor authentication process will not use any of your mobile or email send credits as the verification messages will be sent free of charge. If you'd like to turn it on then follow these steps:

Setup & Options (tab on the left) >> Security Settings and then select how you would prefer the verification PIN to be sent to you; once selected, click save.



If you have any questions regarding this new process then please don't hesitate to contact our support team via telephone 0191 5004 114, email gms@graphicmail.co.uk or livechat available here.