Why should I test my emails before sending?

Anonymous Blackbaud User

Whether you are sending an email to 150 people or 150,000, properly testing your messages before initiating the final send is crucial to maintaining your organization's credibility and providing proper stewardship to your supporters. Sending out a mass email with a typo, or a broken link, or HTML that appears garbled in AOL can be an embarrassing mistake that can turn costly as unsubscribe rates rise and response-rates fall.

Convio provides a "Test Send" option within the Email marketing tools which allows you to thoroughly vet your messages before sending or scheduling the final drop. Here are some tips for using the Test Message mechanism effectively:

Be sure to test your messages in a wide-variety of end-email clients. Set-up email accounts for yourself or identify staff members within your organization who have email addresses with a number of different providers (AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, Lotus Notes, Outlook, Netscape Mail, etc.) for testing purposes.

Assign several people within your department or organization as designated email testers. Create contact records and place each into your Email Test group. Give these staff members a process to follow, including a check-list of items they should confirm for each test email, such as:

Proof for typos and grammatical errors in the message envelope (sender/reply-to address), subject-line, and message body.

Is formatting consistent and compliant with any visual standards of your organization?

Do all images or graphics appear correctly?

Are all links clickable and trackable?

Do personalization fields and conditionalized elements render properly for each user?

Always use the "Send Test Message Immediately" choice on the Delivery Options page rather than creating copies of your email and sending a "final" message to test. This process has several benefits:

Test Messages are queued and delivered ahead of any "final" email jobs, meaning that you can test your messages multiple times and continue to work quickly and efficiently without having to wait for your tests to be delivered behind any larger mass email sends.

The "Test Send" option provides a unique progression of status indicators that allow you to track whether an email message has been properly tested before sending. This can be especially important if you have multiple content-creators or are working on several email campaigns at one time. When you select "Send Test Message Immediately," the email status indicator will display the following workflow: Saved > Test Queued > Test Sending > Tested.

Test messages are identified in the recipient's inbox with "TEST MESSAGE FROM ." This helps the memebers of your internal email test group to differentiate messages that need to be proofed and tested from those that are lower priority.