I think it’s safe to say that for most projects or businesses, it’s important that the emails they send get received. Yet it’s so common to send emails out blindly and just hope they don’t land in the spam folder (and now we have to worry about Gmail’s Promotional and Social tabs gobbling up our emails as well). Everyone knows landing in the spam folder means never getting read, but how do you know if this will be your fate, and how do you avoid it? Sending emails from an Email Service Provider (like MailChimp, AWeber, Campaign Monitor, ConstantContact, GetResponse and others) does NOT guarantee your emails will land in the Inbox, since your email CONTENT matters just as much as the sender’s reputation. The only way to know for sure is through email deliverability testing, so today we’re looking at Inboxtrail, a service that allows you to do just that.
If you use an email service provider such as MailChimp, AWeber, Campaign Monitor, ConstantContact, GetResponse or others, it is very easy to integrate Inboxtrail into them. All you need to do is import Inboxtrail’s seed list into your account, and email the seed list before emailing your real list. This gives you a report on where your emails landed for each provider (Gmail, Hotmail/Outlook, Yahoo, AOL). If you see you’re landing in the spam folder, it’s time to edit your content and run the test again until you find you’re not triggering any spam filters!
Inboxtrail has a really cool dashboard that shows the results of all the tests you’ve ever ran, and when you run a test you can watch the results update in real-time as the seed accounts receive your email. You can see some of its screen shots below:
In addition to the aforementioned, Inbox trail will test your sender/ESP reputation to see how good their deliverability rates are. This is especially important if you have recently switched from one email service to another and have seen a decline in opens and clicks. That doesn’t just happen randomly – there is a reason for this and it has to do with the sender’s reputation.
You can also preview how your email will look in all major email clients and browsers, so that you can spot issues with your email before you send it out. This is especially important because nowadays a large percentage of emails are opened from mobile devices – so you need to make sure your emails work responsively. Not only that, but different email clients will do different things with your email code and may display it differently from what you think. My wife has been working for a Fortune 500 company doing email coding for over 10 years, so I am extremely familiar with all of the issues that emails can have in various email clients and browsers. The point here is that you should test and test again before you send your emails out.
Inboxtrail also has an awesome ESP compare page (http://ift.tt/1SQAlVW) that allows you to see the latest tests and deliverability for all of the major email service providers such as Mailgun, Aweber, Jangosmtp, Mandrill, Campaignmonitor, Postmarkapp, Sendgrid and Mailchimp, and Amazon SES. On this page you can see the percentage of emails that go to inbox vs those that go to spam. This was a real eye opener for me as I saw some providers that had close to 40% emails going to spam, while others had 0% (you’ll just have to check out the page to see who has the lowest deliverability rates).
To sum up – don’t send out your emails blindly and hope they will look perfectly on all email clients and browsers and that they are guaranteed to get to inbox. Test your emails before you send them to check for delivery problems, and fix your delivery problems before emailing your real lists!
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The post Are You Testing If Your Emails Go To Spam Before You Send Them? appeared first on Web Design Blog | Magazine for Designers.
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