Hana LaRock — February 23, 2017 
Email marketing is still one of the best ways for companies to bring in leads. Now that we no longer live in a world where emails are so blank and boring, there’s a lot of potential when it comes to your email marketing campaign. While you can spend all day reading about what you should and shouldn’t include in your emails, (and never neglect reading), that’s not actually the most important thing.
Before you hit the send button on your emails, it’s not about checking if you’ve included all the information, if your sign-off sounds good, or whether or not your images add enough to the page without making it too busy. Though these things are certainly important, those can always be improved with time.
Nope, the one thing that you must do before you hit the send button is TEST, TEST, TEST. If you don’t remember to test your emails before you send them out, you may have yourself a problem!
See if Your Design Looks Right on All Devices and Clients
If you’ve spent so much time and energy into perfecting an email design that will attract leads, don’t let it go to waste. One reason to check your emails before you send them is to make sure that design actually shows up when your reader opens their email. Also, you want to be sure that the design is still loading up on mobile devices, as well as various email clients. Perhaps it loads up well on Gmail but not on Yahoo. You want to check this before you hit send.
Test if Your Personalization Options Work
When companies use marketing automation services, it allows them to do a lot at once. One of these things is personalizing emails. It helps establish rapport with your leads and generally makes them more inclined to read the emails from you in their inbox. So, before you hit send, you want to make sure those personalization options are working. Add yourself and a few colleagues or employees onto that list, and test it before you go ahead.
Make Sure Your Images Load
Adding images is always tricky when it comes to email marketing. If you ultimately decide you are going to insert images into your emails, you need to make sure they load properly, they look right, and your alt tags show on the images. It might also be a chance for you to think, “Hey, maybe we do/don’t need this images after all!”
Test Your Emails To Be Sure Links Are Working
Strong lead-driving emails have links in them to get those leads to perform a call to action. Perhaps you’ve added a link to a landing page to buy a product, sign up, use a coupon, download an eBook, etc. Make sure you test out those links before you hit the send button on your emails. Otherwise, it’ll lose its purpose!
Check if Readers Will Be Able to Reply to You
Is this a “no-reply” email, or an email you want to encourage your leads to reply to? Then test your emails beforehand and check yourself if they can or cannot reply.
See if Your Subject Line Goes Through
Catchy and creative subject lines are very important when implementing your email marketing strategy. However, sometimes subject lines can be too long and get cut off when a reader opens them. You’ll want to check this before.
And, most importantly…
Check For Spelling and Grammar Errors
This should be a given, but in case you forget, one of the most crucial reasons to test your emails before you send them out is to proofread and see if there are any spelling or grammar errors. There’s really nothing that causes you to bang your head against a desk more than a typo in an email.
One tip is to edit your email once over, take a break, test it out, and check again. Eyes need a rest after reading something to be able to catch errors. So, don’t try to do it all at once. This can’t be stressed enough, and should apply to everything you do in business, not just emails.
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