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Testing your campaign in different email clients

Web designers have known for years the difficulties of dealing with the capabilities of different web browsers, like Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. The same web page can render very differently for different viewers.

Email clients are even more varied. Instead of just a few major browsers, you need to consider more than 10 email programs with major market share. And while web browsers are getting much better in terms of their standards support, many email clients have a long way to go. Check out the Email Standards Project to find out more.

So a big part of getting better results from your email campaigns is making sure your emails are readable and appealing in as many different email programs as possible. There is a couple of ways you can do this:

Use your own testing resources

You may already have a few of the major email programs available to you, like a Gmail account, an Outlook 2007 inbox and a Blackberry, for example. Campaign Monitor makes it easy to send a preview of your campaign to several addresses at once. You can login to your accounts and check out the results.

Your test addresses are remembered for you too, so you won’t even need to type them in after the first time. If you need to test more widely though, or you don’t want to invest your time and effort into setting up a whole test suite yourself, Campaign Monitor has another option.

Use the full design and spam testing suite

For a small fee, you can have your email campaign tested in more than 15 of the most popular email clients like Outlook 2007, Windows Live Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, Lotus Notes and many more. It covers desktop, web based and mobile clients.

Not only do you have much wider coverage than you would be able to do on your own (at least without a lot of money and time), you also get your email run through several spam filters, including McAfee Security Center, Norton AntiSpam, Outlook, MessageLabs and Spam Assassin.

See our testing page for the full details of the design and spam testing service including sample screenshots.