Blog

Email testing just got easy!

Published October 05, 2007 by David Greiner

I'm rapt to announce that our brand new design and spam testing feature I mentioned last week is now available in all accounts. Email testing just went from a lot of work to the single click of a mouse.

If you missed the original announcement, this new feature generates screenshots of exactly how your email will look in all the major email clients before you send your campaign. Not only that, but it also runs your content through 8 key spam filters and in most cases tells you exactly what you need to fix if you fail it. All this for just $10, or 1,000 credits. Here's a screenshot of what you can expect for each report you run:

Screenshots in all the major email clients

By clicking on any of the screens above, we'll show you full size screenshots under different scenarios such as images on, images off and even how your email looks in the preview pane.

Here's a sample spam filtering report, which tells you which filters you failed and why. We even provide warnings if you pass a filter since there's value in knowing what spammy words or content structure have an affect on those filters.

Your email tested against popular spam filters and firewalls

Of course, this new feature isn't meant to completely replace our simple testing tools - you can still send a test email to any address you like. But if you're working on a new template design or need to be sure you're not going to get filtered as spam, these reports really do provide you with piece of mind.

To run your own reports, simply head into Create/Send then click on Design and spam testing to get started. You can also read a little more about the reports and some answers to common questions. We hope you like it, and please leave us any feedback or suggestions you might have below.

27 Comments

Posted in: New Features & Updates

27 Comments

Wayde Christie
October 5, 2007 5:10pm

GOLD!!!

This will be as useful for email developers, as the FireBug toolbar is for web developers.
xtfer
October 5, 2007 5:28pm

Did i tell you how much you guys rock!
Chris Abad
October 5, 2007 5:30pm

What a life saver! Doing QA work for emails has always been _so_ much more difficult than doing QA for a website. There are more browsers to test, the differences between browsers are great, and there is the spam element to consider (and the thousands of different variables when it comes to spam). A tool like this is a giant leap forward. Great work.
Mike Bowzeylo
October 5, 2007 5:34pm

Sweet. I can’t wait to use it on my next design.

Your brief sidebar description really puts it in perspective (and funny at the same time):

“Total cost, just under $10,000.
Or, you can click your mouse once and we’ll do the lot for you.”

I love it… now I can spend more time fine tuning rather than testing.

Cheers
Damien Buckley
October 5, 2007 6:17pm

Absolute Killer Feature, can’t add any more.
Damien Buckley
October 5, 2007 6:20pm

No sooner had I hit the ‘post’ button than I realised I could add something. Any chance of seeing this in Mailbuild any time n the future - preferably as an enable/disable option for administrators.
Dave Greiner
October 5, 2007 8:16pm

Thanks for the great feedback guys, it’s awesome to know this is something you’ll find useful. Damien, this will certainly make it into MailBuild if we have enough requests and if it’s popular enough. That’s something we can decide on in the next few weeks.
Tim
October 5, 2007 8:28pm

Please add me as another request for MailBuild! This looks amazing. Thanks guys.
Adam
October 6, 2007 2:11am

Best news ever!

Definitely something I’d love to see in MailBuild - I’ve already had more than a few customers asking me about these kinds of capabilities.
Ali
October 6, 2007 3:28am

Definite yes please for MailBuild! As someone who currently creates newsletters for about 10 different clients and with more on the way it would be such a time saver for me.

I didn’t think MailBuild could get any better but this would be the icing on the cake!
Mark Wyner
October 6, 2007 10:40am

Absolute perfection. It’s like you people are magicians. Your products answer the call for every web designer who is creating HTML emails.

Man, this is good.
Mark Wyner
October 6, 2007 10:46am

You know what would be really awesome? If we could download all of the screen shots together as a PDF or a zip file. I have many clients who want to see how things look across the board.

Is that too insane?
Dave Greiner
October 6, 2007 3:12pm

You know what would be really awesome? If we could download all of the screen shots together as a PDF or a zip file. I have many clients who want to see how things look across the board.

Great suggestion Mark, that’s something we’ve been considering too. As always, we’re listening to all the feedback and suggestions we can get which will shape the direction we take for any future improvements.
Jason
October 9, 2007 1:32am

Awesome feature!

Another vote for MailBuild integration.
Matt
October 9, 2007 2:25am

Love the new feature, but I feel the cost is too high. A one-time test on an email for $10 is fine, but what happens when you make the changes and have to run another test to make sure they worked? Now it’s up to $20…Each new test is $10? I think $10 per campaign with unlimited tests for that campaign would be better. Or, what if there was a one-time fee to add unlimited testing to an account?

I would think that you’re going to test an email an average of twice. Once to see if there a problems, twice to confirm they were fixed.

One of your main competitors has pricing at about $55/month for an individual with unlimited testing of 8 active emails. Assuming you have 8 active campaigns in one month here, that’s at least $80 to test those emails.

Great feature and love it integrated into Campaign Monitor, but I don’t see myself using it much until the pricing comes done.
Dave Greiner
October 9, 2007 12:45pm

Matt, thanks for the thoughtful feedback. I wanted to touch on a couple of your points to try and clarify how we see this feature being used.

I would think that you’re going to test an email an average of twice. Once to see if there a problems, twice to confirm they were fixed.

As I touched on in the post, this isn’t the sort of tool you’d typically use for every campaign you send. In most cases, our customers are re-using a template with modified content for each campaign they send. This tool is ideal for making sure that template works perfectly across all the major email clients. Once you’ve established that with a few tests, you can add the new content for each campaign knowing it will still display well across the board without the need for any further tests.

From my own experience and watching our customers use it the last few days, two to three tests is usually enough to get the desired result. If you identify a particular client that’s giving you hell - say, Windows Live Hotmail - you can always use our free preview tool to send yourself tests to a Hotmail account for free to get that issue resolved. Once that’s sorted, you might run another test to make sure you’re in the clear.

One of your main competitors has pricing at about $55/month for an individual with unlimited testing of 8 active emails.

They sure do, but they also only test in a few email clients, whereas we’ll give you results in 17 of the major email clients plus show how your email will look in the preview pane. Not to mention that we’ll also run your email through 8 of the most popular spam filters and tell you what to fix if you get blocked.

Based on the feedback we’ve been getting so far and how popular the tool has already been, we think we’ve set a very fair price point. Thanks again for sharing your thoughts.
Paul
October 9, 2007 8:21pm

I totally agree with Matt - this is far too expensive. A fee per campaign would be really attractive to our agency.
Matt
October 10, 2007 5:40am

@Paul: how is what they’re doing not a fee per campaign?
Mark Wyner
October 10, 2007 5:55am

Why all of the ball busting about the fees? This is a phenomenal service for a modest fee. As David pointed out, you can run your template through the system and then use the free utility they provide to test repeatedly for problematic email-clients. And once your template proves successful, you should only need to run each edition through this utility one time.

Given how much time it takes to test emails across the board, I think $10 is quite reasonable. Even if you run it through three times, that’s only $30. You can easily add that to your fees so the client pays for it. It’s a valuable service you’re providing to your clients, so it’s a reasonable and logical expense.

Ultimately, Campaign Monitor is providing a service for a fee they (and many others) believe is reasonable. They’re not selling a used car or having a garage sale. So why the negotiation on fees? Hell, if you’re marking up your campaigns you’re even making money off of Campaign Monitor.

I think they have a really good system in place, and this utility is no exception. In fact, I believe this significantly increases the value of their entire system.
Matt
October 11, 2007 2:07am

This tool is ideal for making sure that template works perfectly across all the major email clients. Once you’ve established that with a few tests, you can add the new content for each campaign knowing it will still display well across the board without the need for any further tests.

Completely agree. However, once the email template is finalized, I’m still going to want to run new campaigns through the test to check spam filters. But I’m still paying for the email client previews, which at that point, you’re right, I don’t need. If you could split the tests in two, seems that would be another approach. $5 per test for email clients and $5 per test for spam? To me, they really are two separate tests that are done at different points during the development process.

@Paul: how is what they’re doing not a fee per campaign?
You pay per test, not per campaign. So if you test one campaign three times, that’s $30 versus a one-time $10 fee per campaign.

Don’t get me wrong, I think the service looks great and I was very excited when I saw it introduced. It’s just that my excitement dwindled some after seeing the cost. I think Campaign Monitor has the best email service, in terms of interface, ease of use, from customization down to support, up to and especially including—the cost. To me, this cost per test just seems slightly out of line with the actual cost of sending the campaign.
Mark Wyner
October 12, 2007 4:32am

@Matt:

In hindsight, I realize my comment may have seemed like an attack. It wasn’t. It’s good to question things. Anyway, I hope I didn’t offend.
Jason Grigsby
October 12, 2007 6:28am

I’d like an easier way to share the results of the tests with customers as well. I don’t know that a pdf is necessary as Mark suggests although that would be pretty slick. An alternative would be to add the testing view to the client interface for Campaign Monitor. Maybe you check a box selectively publish a test to the client interface.
Jason
December 20, 2007 6:11am

How long does it take to receive the reports?
Jason
December 20, 2007 6:29am

Nevermind… it begins processing almost immediately. This is completely amazing! I would love to know how this works.
Lublin
April 18, 2008 4:33am

This is good product, perfect and very useful. Thanks David for this article.
Rules
July 7, 2008 10:59pm

There are more browsers to test, the differences between browsers are great, and there is the spam element to consider (and the thousands of different variables when it comes to spam). A tool like this is a giant leap forward. Great work.
Paul
July 31, 2008 9:01am

I would love to see this available in MailBuild too. Have you decided to add it yet? If so, when do you plan to make it be available?

Comments for this entry are closed.

Browse the Blog

Explore the Email Gallery

@keviano You mean the option doesn't show up in the menu? Could it be you're logged into a client account, not the designer account? ^SM

Single-click testing

See screenshots of your email in 20+ email clients and check against spam filters.
Powerful API

Interact and “sync” with your account via simple web-based methods.
CSS support in email

Designing for email can be tricky. Save your sanity with our complete CSS guide.