Before committing to send an email to your entire database,
it’s best practice to test it first.
This may come as a surprise to some people, but email providers such as Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo mail don’t render or display all emails the same way. This is because emails go through pre-processing before it even gets to your inbox. This phase strips the email code of anything the email provider doesn’t recognize or support. It also breaks all the links and images to prevent external content from being displayed without the user’s permission.
Web-based email providers like Gmail and Outlook.com go further by converting the email into code that is safe to display on their website (your web inbox). After this is done, the email appears in your inbox. However, the display engine between email providers differ. The display engine translates the code into colours, shapes, text and images and displays it to your screen. The engine that powers this process is again different between each email client, resulting in their own quirks in the way they display the email.
You might be thinking, but you tested our template during the design process, didn’t you?
The answer to this question is yes, but the content you add to the template was not and on occasion, email providers drop support for content and styling which has happened several times over the years. One example of this is video embedding or the ability to play video in email. 5 years ago, there were more than 10 email providers that supported video playback in email- now there are only 5 that do. In short, be careful not to blindly trust email providers to display your email the way you intend it to look.
Now that you know why you need to test your email; how do you go about testing it?
- When testing your email, you want to first make sure your email looks good in preview mode in iRealty.
- Once you are happy with the desktop preview, click on mobile preview at the top of the page to see how it will look on mobile.
- If everything looks good, the next step is sending the test.
If you can, you want to see how your email looks on as many of the major email providers out there. The top 5 most popular email providers* as of January 2019 are:
#1 Apple iPhone 28%
#2 Gmail 27%
#3 Outlook 9%
#4 Apple iPad 9%
#5 Apple Mail 8%
This is great news if you have a Gmail account, own an iPhone, and have Outlook installed on your computer as you can pretty much cover the top 5 because #1, #4, and #5 use the same pre-processing and display engine and will display the same (apart from the desktop and mobile view differences). If you don’t have a Gmail account, the good thing is, it’s free to sign up. If you don’t have an iPhone on the other hand, they are not free, but the likely hood is someone in your office will. You can kindly ask them to check it for you and they might even catch something you didn’t. If you do come across any display issues, give us a call and we can help. The likelihood of there being a major display issue is low but if you’ve done your tests then you can be confident that your email will look good in the majority of your subscribers’ inboxes.
* source: http://emailclientmarketshare.com
