Email client testing

Every browser and device displays emails differently, so if you want to make sure your message looks good to everyone on your email list, you need to test your email.

How does your email look? There’s more than one answer

Email marketing messages need to look good to get a good response from the reader – it’s not enough to have an eye-catching subject line. Because there aren’t HTML email standards, every client device displays them differently. Is the dress blue and black or white and gold? It depends on how you interpret the light. When it comes to email design, the actual appearance depends on how the device and email client interpret HTML formatting. Even the simplest HTML tag, the tag to separate paragraphs, can be handled differently by different clients. When it comes to more complex HTML formatting and CSS, the same input can lead to dramatically different output. Some clients don’t support certain features at all. Your clever animated gif? It won’t be seen by readers using Outlook.

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Verify your email’s appearance through email client testing

To make sure your subscribers see your email the way you intended, you need to test the formatting on a variety of devices, browsers, and applications. Then you can alter the formatting, possibly with conditional HTML, to make sure the message displays properly. Testing email can be hard work if you try to create test accounts with every email provider and install different email clients on every possible mobile and desktop device. It’s much easier to use an email client testing tool. These tools usually let you send a test email to a single test account and send you an email preview that shows how it displays in a wide range of email clients. With a testing tool, you can make sure your message is attractive and readable in Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, Apple Mail, Yahoo, and other popular email client applications. You can tweak your formatting and retest until the inbox preview test results look good in all the major email clients.

Test your email and then get it delivered with Mailgun

Email testing isn’t a one-time task, because browsers and email clients can change how they handle messages at any time. Plan to test periodically, and always do a test when you change your email template or start a major email campaign. The email testing tools aren’t always real-time; it can take a day or so to receive the inbox preview images. And it can take time to format messages properly for all the clients you need to support, so build that time into your schedule. Once your messages look good, make sure there aren’t any delays in getting them delivered. Mailgun’s reliable email service sends messages out with high email deliverability rates and our SLA means we’ll be able to send when you’re ready, you can even kick it up a notch with our rapid fire throughput to get important messages out without delay. Sending over 100,000 messages per month? Check out our plans to bundle together features for better deliverability.

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