The best way to 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 how one can keep away from cringe-worthy errors.

Keep in mind that cringe-worthy second when Steve Harvey learn the unsuitable identify for the winner of Miss Universe?

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

This doesn’t take a variety of time – possibly 5 to 10 minutes. It’s going to preserve you from embarrassing your self and annoying your subscribers. One dangerous expertise will be sufficient to show a subscriber away for good.

However should you do by chance 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 possibly can at all times ship an apology e mail.

The 2 commonest kinds of e mail advertising errors

There are two kinds of errors we see in emails.

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 Human errors: lacking phrases, typos, unsuitable dates, damaged hyperlinks, or outdated information 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

Fortunately, each of a lot of these errors will be prevented.

The best way to keep away from human errors in e mail messages

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

The open charge is wonderful: Greater than 60% of your subscribers opened the e-mail! Greater than 30% of people that opened the hyperlink clicked by way of 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 unsuitable hyperlink.”

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

“I wished to purchase it, however once 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 right hyperlink. However by now, you’ve most likely misplaced a big portion of subscribers who clicked by way of 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 surprise if possibly it isn’t some form of misguided tactic individuals attempt 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:

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

The best way to use an e mail pre-flight guidelines

Now we have 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 beneath that you should utilize 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 by way of. Verify that each merchandise on the checklist has been checked.

This does, clearly, add just a few 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.) This may enable you hear the place your writing may want some fine-tuning and it’ll enable you discover typos or lacking phrases. It could additionally enable 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 provide you an trustworthy critique. They provide a contemporary pair of eyes which will catch one thing you didn’t.
3. If it’s a advertising e mail, affirm 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 submit, a registration web page, and so forth?
4. Paste the copy of your e mail into the free model of Grammarly to verify there are not any typos or different copy errors. Additionally paste the topic line and preheader in to verify there are not 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 cellular gadget like your cellphone.
7. You probably have a big checklist (over 2,000 subscribers) or in case your emails have a posh format or are utilizing superior coding like AMP, test how your e mail shows in an e mail testing device (see beneath for extra info).
8. Click on on each single hyperlink within the e mail – together with linked photographs. (Thankfully, should 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. Whenever you click on on every hyperlink, confirm your monitoring hyperlinks are working appropriately (should you’ve added monitoring codes)
10. Verify that you simply’ve included alt-text on your photographs. Why? Different textual content seems within the place of a picture. Many e mail companies will disable photographs in messages, and a few customers flip them off all collectively. Alt-text permits the person to grasp what was meant to be there. It’s additionally useful for any of your subscribers which may be visually impaired.

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

The best way to keep away from show errors in e mail messages

In an ideal world, all e mail companies would show emails the identical manner. There could be no default setting to dam photographs, 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 manner. ☹️

In e mail advertising lingo, how e mail messages show in several e mail purchasers is named “rendering.” So you’ll have heard these show errors known as “rendering errors” up to now.

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

One of the simplest ways 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 checklist means that you can view your e mail out of your subscriber’s perspective: in an inbox just like theirs out of your desktop or cellular gadget.

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 if you’re within the Message Editor.

Then enter your e mail tackle (or the e-mail tackle of whomever you need to ship the check e mail to) within the area on the subsequent web page:

Notice that within the view above, we’ve turned the “Cellular preview” on, so we’re viewing an approximation of how the e-mail would look in a cellular gadget.

Simply taking that additional step is a superb 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 should you’ve acquired a big checklist, or if you wish to make certain your emails render appropriately.

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

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

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

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

Rendering variations can even trigger photographs to get cut-off, misplaced textual content or worse.

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

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

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

When utilizing this methodology to check emails earlier than sending, it’s necessary to view your emails in a wide range of e mail purchasers, and with a wide range of gadgets. So that you may need to arrange accounts on just a few e mail purchasers like Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook. Then view the emails despatched to every of these e mail purchasers by way of completely different gadgets, like a desktop, a cellphone, and an iPad or comparable gadget. Then attempt viewing your emails utilizing darkish mode.

This works — and it’s free — however you may most likely see how this could get fairly time-consuming. It might simply take longer to test your e mail than it did to put in writing it and lay it out!

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

Whereas an awesome begin, the primary testing methodology — creating e mail addresses for the highest e mail purchasers — will be inaccurate should you ship a variety of e mail.

So it’s possible you’ll need to attempt a paid e mail testing service. With an e mail testing device, you may see at a look how your e mail will render throughout quite a few e mail purchasers and gadgets suddenly.

At AWeber, we use Litmus to check our emails. Within the screenshot beneath, you may see how Litmus allow you to see emails on a number of purchasers, by way of a number of gadgets, with a number of settings, in minutes.

Though Litmus is an efficient match for us, you may 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 that you must check emails earlier than sending

In order that’s how one can by no means need to 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 need to be fancy. Select which steps you are feeling are important, then let go of the remaining. 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 by way of their checklist, then click on “Ship.”

Your e mail testing device additionally doesn’t need to be overcomplicated. In the event you’ve acquired a small checklist and also you’re brief on time, checking your emails in one among two e mail purchasers in your cellphone and in your laptop computer may be wonderful. It depends upon what number of assets you may have, and on how excellent you need your emails to be.

Right here’s a secret professional trick that may enable you keep away from e mail errors, too: Use a pre-designed template. Templates have been rigorously checked to verify they’ll render properly in each main e mail shopper. As long as you don’t fiddle with the e-mail template an excessive amount of, you may belief your emails will look good should you use a template. And should you do need to modify 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.