Your marketing team sends out hundreds of email marketing campaigns. They pay close attention to the marketing copy and email content and play around with the format to make them the best they can be. After all, no one wants to send a bad email. But did you know you should be testing all your emails before they go out?
Without email testing tools, your email marketing efforts might be wasted. You could end up with email deliverability issues like hitting the spam filter of your recipients, risk incorrectly displayed emails on different email service providers or devices, or subject lines that don’t get opened.
Email tests are a great way to ensure the emails you deliver are high quality and reach your intended audience.
Companies have high expectations for their email marketing efforts since the average ROI is $42 for every $1 you spend on email marketing. Wasted effort significantly cuts into that return.
Unfortunately, over 16% of all emails sent never make it into the inbox, and that’s because many emails aren’t optimized for deliverability. It doesn’t matter how much effort you put into the design and content of your email because your subscribers won’t even see it.
This article will cover why you should use email testing platforms and offer our picks of the best paid and free tools out there.
Table of contents:
Why use email testing tools?
Email testing tools are a core component of any email marketer’s tech arsenal. Testing tools are just as important as taking the time to craft the perfect email.
Along with other email marketing and email tracking software, email testing software is vital to your workflow. They allow marketers to assess their email design and layout and how it renders across various devices and browsers.
You can use email testing tools to test your email subject line to find out which ones are likely to get opened and pass the recipients’ spam filters with spam testing. You can also A/B test different versions of the same email to find out which has better conversion rates.
Email tests help you optimize your email’s deliverability before you hit send, reducing wasted efforts and increasing the chance your emails hit the mark. You can pinpoint when and where you might be going wrong and take steps to fix it, leading to greater ROI on your email marketing efforts.
Six paid email testing tools you should consider
Now that you know why using email testing tools is so important let’s take a look at our top-rated paid tools for you to consider.
1. ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is a customer experience automation tool with excellent email testing capabilities focused on deliverability. If you’re searching for a system that helps unify your customer communication and get more leads, look no further.
ActiveCampaign has a few different methods for testing whether your campaign is displaying correctly. First, you can send a test version of your campaign to a list of specific email addresses to see how your email is rendering in popular email clients.
The desktop preview automatically shows you how your email displays across desktop and mobile. The email preview shows you how your email will look across different email clients, including Gmail, Yahoo, Apple Mail, and Outlook.
ActiveCampaign also enables you to split test (or A/B test) your email campaigns, creating different versions of your campaign and sending each version to a limited number of subscribers on your email list to see how they perform. The version that gets the best results is then sent to the rest of your list.
ActiveCampaign starts at $9 a month.Â
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2. Mailgun
Mailgun is an email marketing tool that offers robust email testing facilities. You can preview your Mailgun emails on different devices without setting up test accounts on every email client you might be sending to. Mailgun allows you to test and adjust your formatting until your email displays correctly on every major email mailbox.
Mailgun also prevents your emails from ending up in the spam folders by testing before sending. It scans your emails in advance with a spam filter and tells you when you need to make changes.
It’s important not to get regularly marked as spam, or your domain name or IP address could get penalized.
You can also test your subject lines with Mailgun by using an A/B tester to improve your email open rates.
Mailgun starts at $35 a month.Â
3. Email on Acid
Email on Acid is a useful email testing tool that allows you to preview your emails on different devices and clients before sending them out to your subscribers. It features 90+ clients and devices, so you can ensure that emails display as intended whether the customer is using Android, iPhone, Gmail, or Outlook.
Email on Acid also improves your email deliverability with blocklist domain and spam tests. You can test your email against 23 spam filters to see if it will make it into the subscriber’s inbox and run your IP address against the most common blocklist services.
A handy additional service that Email on Acid offers is the ability to collaborate on emails by sharing an email preview through a link. Teammates can use this link to review your email, making it easier to work together on creating stunning marketing emails.
Email on Acid starts at $74 a month.Â
4. Litmus
Litmus is a robust email marketing software that offers the capabilities for you to test your emails before sending them out. You can quickly preview your emails and see how they display in the most common email clients. It also provides proactive recommendations to show you how to optimize them.
Litmus also allows you to send an automated test to check important elements of your email, like links and images, and whether your email is accessible to users of all abilities with accessibility checks. Litmus Spam Testing rates your email against more than 25 spam filters and notifies you if there are any problems.
Litmus starts at $79 a month.Â
5. PreviewMyEmail
PreviewMyEmail does what it says on the tin and allows you to preview your campaigns before you send them. You can see what your emails look like on all major platforms and use that information to improve the design.
Its spam checker allows you to test for all deliverability problems by analyzing which part of the inbox they arrive in. Your IP address is tested against typical blacklists so you can identify and solve deliverability errors before they become a problem.
PreviewMyEmail also offers analytics to check on the performance of every email, such as open rates, open duration, and click-through rates.
PreviewMyEmail starts from $25 a month. Â
6. GlockApps
GlockApps is an email testing tool designed to assess your emails for spam. They tell you how many of your emails end up in the inbox or the spam folder using their spam checker. Their spam score checker sends your email through the usual spam filters and returns a report containing highlights of email concerns.
Other features of GlockApps include a website uptime monitoring tool to ensure that you’re sending customers to a working website from your campaign emails. GlockApps will alert you immediately if your IP is blacklisted so you can fix any problems before they get out of control.
GlockApp’s DMARC analytics checker takes security seriously. You can identify any suspicious or fraudulent activity and take steps to prevent your account from being compromised.
GlockApps starts at $59 a month.Â
Better Emails, Fast
Five free email testing tools
There’s a wide range of paid email testing tools with various capabilities. But, if you’re working with a shoestring budget, what free options are there for email testing?
1. Accessible Email
Accessible Email evaluates the accessibility of your emails and provides suggestions on how you could make improvements to your email.
You copy and paste your HTML code into their interface, and then Accessible Email will offer suggestions as to how you can make your HTML more accessible.
2. PutsMail
PutsMail is owned by Litmus and offers capabilities for HTML validation. It allows marketers to send several emails to team members at once and test how they look in different inboxes. You can send test emails to up to ten email addresses.
When submitting your emails to the system, you must upload two different formats: text and HTML. PutsMail allows you to preview your emails in Outlook, Gmail, iPhone 8, and Apple Mail.
3. Sender Score
Sender Score is a tool that ranks your sender reputation quality on a scale between 0 and 100. The closer your score is to 100, the better your reputation is, and the more likely your emails will pass the spam filters in your recipients’ inboxes. Simply register for the platform and submit your IP address for the system to scan, and you will receive your sender score.
4. Postmark
Postmark allows you to check the spam score of your email marketing campaign by copying and pasting the HTML into their system. Once you hit enter, you will get a list of issues relating to your email, which you can fix before sending it.
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5. SubjectLine
SubjectLine is a rating tool that evaluates your email subject line, giving it a score out of 100. Once you submit your subject line for testing, SubjectLine gives you a list of suggestions for how you could improve and their advice on how your subject line measures up against industry standards.
Conclusion
You should now be thoroughly convinced of the value of email testing tools in enhancing your email marketing campaigns. You may get less ROI than you would like on your campaigns if you’re not adequately testing them before you press send.
Email testing tools can help ensure that your campaigns reach your target inboxes, get opened once they arrive, and render correctly once opened. You really can’t afford to miss out on this vital step of testing your emails.
While there are some valuable free tools out there, it’s best to invest in a paid solution to ensure you have access to the most functionality. Consider ActiveCampaign as your email testing tool of choice. ActiveCampaign is an email marketing/marketing automation platform with ample A/B testing tools that you can use to improve the deliverability of your emails. Contact ActiveCampaign today to speak to someone about how we can help your business.
