Are you testing your campaigns?
Getting your emails to your recipients’ inboxes is only half of the deliverability challenge. The other half is making sure that your emails render properly in the different email clients. After all, it doesn’t matter how many messages reach the inbox if they contain missing graphics, broken links, and garbled information.
To prevent this from happening, you must test your campaigns in different email clients. This is accomplished easily as you only have to set up email accounts with AOL, Yahoo! Mail, Google Mail, MSN Hotmail, and Outlook, and then forward the message to your different accounts to see how the message appears through the different email services. If you notice a problem, you’ll be able to fix it before sending it out to your entire list.
Another way to combat deliverability issues is to test your campaigns through a spam score feature. Spam score evaluates messages using specific tests to determine whether or not the message will be delivered as spam. Spam score rates the message and gives you detailed reports on the areas of the email that may present a problem so you can edit the message prior to sending it. A low spam score greatly increases the deliverability of the message.
You can also perform tests in areas other than deliverability. A/B split testing is an email marketing best practice that allows you to test different sections of your email campaigns, such as subject line, images, content copy, call to action buttons, and delivery time. The tests are easy to perform. Simply choose the areas of your email you want to test, create three different versions of the email, extract 10 percent of the subscribers from your list, divide that group into three separate groups, and send out one version of the email to each test group. Be sure to carefully track your responses using the metrics noted above so you can send the best performing email to the other 90 percent of your list. A/B split testing is a best practice that will greatly increase your subscriber response.