An email testing process can seem like a lot of unnecessary work, especially when it feels like your personal Gmail inbox is the last place anyone will see your message. But in this era of constant communication, every business needs to take their emails seriously as an opportunity to connect with customers and drive sales.
If you have no idea what we’re talking about, email testing is the process of verifying that the primary objective of your marketing message is effectively conveyed in its final delivery. It’s crucial for measuring how individual recipients react to your message and whether or not they are taking the action you want them to take after reading it. In other words, it helps you make sure that your messages will get read and responded to as intended by whomever they are meant for.
What Is Email Testing?
Email testing is the process of confirming that your marketing messages are being received and understood as intended by individual recipients. It applies to any email marketing campaign, whether it’s for customer acquisition, retention, or engagement.
Email testing is used to analyze your copy to make sure it’s effective and doesn’t turn people off. The goal of this process is to make sure your emails are not only delivered to the inbox, but also read, understood, and responded to as you intended. It’s critical to test your emails to make sure they are effective.
Benefits of Email Testing
While email testing may seem like a major headache in the beginning, it’s worth the effort. We’ve seen this will all our customers, after millions of email tests executed for companies around the globe.
A good email testing process ensures the success of your email campaigns, which is critical for increasing customer engagement and driving sales. Once your team understands their metrics, they can easily make adjustments to their email marketing campaign to ensure each message is effective and resonates with the audience they are trying to reach.
Here are a few ways your team can benefit from a thorough email testing process:
More Effective Email Marketing
As we’ve discussed, open rates are a good indicator of whether or not your emails are resonating with customers. It’s important to track these numbers over time to see which emails are performing the best and which ones need to be revised or scrapped altogether.
Higher Email Deliverability
The last thing you want is to have increased unsubscribe rates, so high that your emails are being blocked by spam filters. That’s why it’s important to test your emails and make sure they are up to standard. Once your team knows what works, they can make minor adjustments to keep your emails on the right track.
Better Customer Engagement
Some companies mistakenly assume that their emails are being opened and read as intended. But that’s not always the case and can often lead to underwhelming results. By testing your emails, you can make sure that your message is actually reaching your customers and resonating in the way you hoped it would. That way, you can engage with your customers on a deeper level and drive more sales as a result.
Metrics on an Email Test
Open rate
Open rate is the first metric everyone looks at when it comes to email marketing. It’s often thought of as an “out of the box” measurement of success but shouldn’t be seen as a be-all and end-all. While the open rate may not tell the whole story, it’s still a helpful tool for determining the effectiveness of your message.
Open rates measure the percentage of recipients who opened your email, broken down by total number of recipients. That being said, recipients who read your email without actually clicking on it (presumably because they are not interested) are not counted. This means that open rate is a fairly reliable way of determining which emails are engaging customers and which ones are falling flat.
Clickthrough rate
Clickthrough rate is the most commonly misunderstood measurement of email success. While it’s true that the clickthrough rate can be a useful tool for determining which emails are resonating with customers and which ones are not, it’s important to keep in mind that it can be a little misleading.
The clickthrough rate measures how many recipients actually clicked on a link from your email. So, if an email has a clickthrough rate of 40%, that doesn’t mean 40% of recipients clicked on a link. It means 40% of recipients who received the email actually clicked on something in the email. This is important to note because it means a clickthrough rate doesn’t account for the number of people who may have opened or even read your email without taking any action whatsoever.
Any marketing team can benefit from the use of these two metrics, but they are by no means the only tools available during an email testing process. Other important metrics to consider during your testing phase include, but are not limited to open time, click time, bounce rate, and unsubscribe rate.
Bounce rate
A bounce rate on an email test is the percentage of people who either ignore your email or mark it as spam. There is no average bounce rate for an email because every industry has different standards for determining what is acceptable. However, if your bounce rate is too high, you could end up with a poor inbox placement. If you notice that a lot of your emails are ending up in the trash with a high bounce rate, then try to identify why this might be happening. You might need to reevaluate your email subject line or maybe even modify your approach to email marketing altogether.
Ways to Test Your Email
The most important aspect of any email marketing campaign is making sure your messages are effective, and that they are received as intended by your customers. In order to achieve this, your marketing team must go through a thorough testing process to make sure their emails are optimized for success.
Here are a few of the most important email tests to ensure your messages are reaching their full potential.
Cross Device Testing
Prior to sending your message, test it on various mobile devices including tablets to ensure that the design and content work well. The significance of cross device testing is clear. More individuals now open emails on mobile devices than on desktop computers, so test your message both on desktop and mobile devices. To test your email on your phone or tablet, simply send it and see if everything looks good. Look at everything from the text to the buttons, to see if everything is legible. Make sure the layout stays right where it should be.
Test on Various Email Service Providers
When using a different email client, emails may look different as well. An email in Yahoo may look different than one in Outlook, for example. It is important to test your email across multiple clients to ensure that it appears the same. Check your links to ensure they are working.
Test through an Email Testing Platforms
Even though almost all email services providers used by marketers such as MailChimp, HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, Constant Contact, GetResponse, to name a few, are offering basic email testing for your campaigns, in order to get more in-depth level testing results you have to use an email testing platform along with your email marketing services. MailMonitor offers a variety of email testing tools, such as inbox tab placement, ISP trends, spam traps and filters, email blocklist, open tracking and email preview against different devices and browsers.
Email testing is an essential part of any email marketing campaign. It allows you to test different elements of your email to see what works best and what could be improved. It is also important to track your data and monitor your email campaigns. It will give you a better idea of what is working and what isn’t.
With a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t, you can make necessary changes to your email marketing strategy and improve upon your message. This will help you get better inbox placement and increase your ROI and sales.
