The moments right before email marketers hit send on an email are some of the most important in a campaign lifecycle. Strategy has been realized, coding has been perfected, and lists are segmented. But a broken email can derail the entire plan if a mistake has gone unchecked.
Email quality assurance (QA) is a critical step in the email marketing process. The most successful email programs rely on pre-send checklists and a codified process to check all email elements before a message is deployed.
A study by Litmus provides a comprehensive summary of how email marketers strategize, execute, and evaluate their campaigns – including quality assurance checks. The results, determined by over 3,000 marketers who took the survey, provide valuable insights into the most commonly used QA practices that can be incorporated in your email marketing workflow.
The survey determined the following about QA:
- A majority of marketers use some sort of pre-send checklist, but only 22% had an extensive QA checklist. 51% reported using a short checklist, and 27% reported using none at all.
- More than half of marketers test every email they send. 58% reported testing every email, 20% occasionally tested all emails, 18% only tested new and updated template emails, and 4% don’t test any emails.
- Most brands focus testing on the most popular email clients, like Google, Apple, and Microsoft Outlook. 57% focus on the most popular email clients in the global email client market share, 24% focus their testing to the email clients their subscribers use most, and 19% test emails for every email client.
- Close to half of brands occasionally use spam filters to check emails. 44% occasionally run emails through a spam filter test, 22% run every email through a spam filter test, and 34% don’t test through a spam filter at all.
What does this mean? A majority of email marketers utilize some level of quality control, and some take it to the next level by testing every email for issues regarding functionality, deliverability, and rendering.
The ResponseGenius solution supports several QA tools built directly into the email platform – Litmus, Email on Acid and Mail Tester. We also have extensive validation routines built into the solution that thoroughly tests for potential content spam issues, as well as advanced testing of all links, images, HTML, subject lines, etc. The platform ensures QA is done on every email before it is sent.
So, whatever level of QA you can accommodate, know the benefits are worth the time and resources. Emails that render and deliver correctly protect your brand’s reputation, improve ROI, and ultimately reach more subscribers.
Let ResponseGenius help take your email marketing to the next level – hello@responsegenius.com
