Design and spam testing price drops by 50%

May 13, 2008

Design and spam test screenshot with new $5 price tag

Since we first launched our design and spam testing tool in October of last year, you have collectively run many thousands of tests, and you've told us you loved the tool.

Since that first launch, we have added the 'fold' line, and extended the tests to cover mobile email clients.

In fact, you've told us it is so valuable that you'd love to use it even more. The huge uptake means we've been able to take advantage of scale and cut the price in half!

The big price drop should make it possible for you to run more tests per campaign, or just make the existing testing charges you pass on to your client more profitable.

We've got more improvements planned for the testing tool, so keep an eye on the blog for future updates. For now though, enjoy the cheaper testing! We look forward to seeing some truly excellent campaigns going out.

Posted in: New Features & Updates

19 Comments

Brandon
May 13, 2008 3:54pm

Excellent news - thanks guys :)
Richard
May 13, 2008 4:37pm

Awesome. Would love to see plain text tests too.
Dave Greiner
May 13, 2008 4:54pm

Glad you’re digging the price drop guys. Richard, if you’re looking to see just how the plain text portion of your email renders, you’ll need to run a test on a plain text only campaign I’m afraid.

If an email client supports HTML (which they all do except BlackBerry), it will render that version when testing a combined HTML and plain text email, just like it would if you ran the test yourself.
Kay Smoljak
May 13, 2008 5:20pm

Is it possible to use this service with MailBuild?
Dean
May 13, 2008 5:21pm

I’d be interested to know if anyone does directly pass on this charge to their clients i.e. declare it separately in the billing - I’ve just taken it as a cost of production so far on the assumption that my clients wouldn’t understand why it was necessary if I was doing my job properly.
Dave Greiner
May 13, 2008 5:45pm

Not right now Kay, but it’s under development. Great question Dean, I’d love to know the answers too. I do know many customers who pass this cost on as a QA fee in the template design process. Would be interesting to hear how anyone else is approaching it.
Wayde Christie
May 13, 2008 7:50pm

@Dean - I’m passing the testing fee onto my clients, as well as charging them at my hourly rate for setting up and running the tests. I usually just let them know up front and they’re cool with that.

What I’d LOVE to be able to do is run a test then give my client access to the test results for approval. I occasionally work for other web companies, so these clients like to know for certain that their campaigns are looking good across the board.

Dave?
Wayde Christie
May 13, 2008 7:52pm

Great news on the price drop too. I’ll definitely be running more tests now.

I was hesitant to run tests in the past due to cost - especially multiple tests. Not no more!
Dr. Leslie Brown
May 13, 2008 9:04pm

Well for $5, I’ll consider it. But for many of us in the initial phase of getting our businesses ticking over, we just can’t spare $10 on something like this…

Thanks very much,
Les.
Mathew Patterson
May 13, 2008 9:25pm

Thanks for the feedback guys. Les, glad you are willing to consider it now.

I would suggest that if your alternative is to test everything manually, you’d quickly find that you had spent a lot more than $10 worth of time.
Dave Greiner
May 13, 2008 9:27pm

Cheers for the great feedback Wayde, I can understand how that would be helpful. Just to clarify, would you like each client to see every test you run, or just those you set as visible to your clients?
James
May 13, 2008 9:57pm

Great news guys…
Is there anything in the pipeline for supporting the Mac email clients i.e. Mail and Entourage etc?
Ran a test the other day and didn’t see them in the results…
Dave Greiner
May 13, 2008 10:12pm

James, Apple Mail’s CSS support is golden, so if it works in Safari (Webkit), it will work in Mail. Entourage 2008 looks to offer solid CSS support too. New Freshview team member Travis is currently updating our CSS support article with a host of new email clients, Entourage 2008 included, so we’ll be posting more on that soon.
James
May 14, 2008 12:03am

Cool - good to know that on the whole they’re pretty safe
It would be nice to have them, all the same - just to show our clients that it’s been checked in that client.
I know I had an issue with a newsletter yesterday where a link colour wasn’t getting overridden correctly in Apple Mail but was showing correctly in all PC-based email clients… admittedly I hadn’t checked the newsletter separately in safari :-/
Anna
May 14, 2008 7:26am

Great news, thanks guys!

We do not declare testing separately in our billing…we just absorbed the $10 testing fee (now $5).

We always explain that we test as part of our template design process but rather than have a whole bunch of small fees, we just have a single flat rate. Most of my clients don’t have time to look at tests but are still happy to know they have been carried out.

Other design companies and marketing agencies often outsource their HTML templates to us and they would probably be more interested in seeing test results…
Wayde Christie
May 14, 2008 10:08am

@Dave - A simple world viewable link would be ideal, then I could point my clients to any test results I wanted. I realise there may be security issues with that though.
Todd
May 20, 2008 5:21am

It would be handy, since we can already associate campaigns with clients, if there was a field where we could enter a job number as well. Just for our own records.

And then, that could come through on your email receipt, so it would be SUPER easy for our financial/billing person to reconcile everything (especially now that the price has dropped, we’re going to have a LOT more emails like that come trhough).

Once again, you guys are great, and this isn’t a “MUST HAVE” feature, but rather a “nice to have”.

Keep up the great work. Thanks guys!
Wayde Christie
May 21, 2008 3:05am

Something which kills me every time I run a test, is that it’s usually only one freakin’ email client which is causing me grief. What I would LOVE would be the ability to choose which email clients I run the test on - at a reduced price of course. I’d be much happier to pay $1 per test per email client, than $5 per test for 37 clients which render perfectly straight off the bat.
Wayde Christie
May 21, 2008 3:11am

I had an epiphany in regard to my earlier comment about allowing my clients to access my email tests. In Safari and firefox you can right click any generated screenshot and open it in a new window. These images can be viewed by anyone, so it’s simply a matter of sending your client links to the screenshots they need to see.

Still - would be nice to give em access to ALL of the screenshots under one roof ;)

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