Before you send out any bulk email, you should always test it to make sure it is correct, accurate and works. Once you send your bulk emails, there is no recalling the email, so you need to make sure the email is 100% before it goes out. Here is a handy list of things to check before you send out your emails.

Check how the email looks in different clients

Email Clients (such as Outlook, Apple mail) are not as developed as the browsers . Unlike websites, there is also no supported coding standard for emails. So all the email clients use their own technology to show the emails and also pick and choose what code they want to support. This means that how you see your email might be totally different to how someone else sees your email. Usually an email coding company will test all these different email clients for you and let you know if your email will not look as great in any client (such as Lotus Notes which has always been an issue for email marketing). So if you  use different clients to view your email, please test it for all of them.

Check how the emails looks in mobiles

Majority of emails are now opened in mobiles. Also mobiles have their own email clients and there is no standard across them. While mobile clients are a lot more advanced that desktop clients, it is a good idea to view and test emails on mobiles before sending it out.

Proof read your Content for Spelling/Grammar

Make sure you check your content so that there are no spelling mistakes or grammatical mistakes.

Check all the links

Just because there is a link in an email doesn’t mean that it is the correct link and it is working. Always click on all the links on a test email to make sure

• that the link is correct
• that the link loads properly
• that the link is not an internal link that only you or your company can access

Check all the images

Make sure that you can see all the images in your email and

• if the image has a link, the link works
• the image is not stretched or distorted
• the image is not bad quality

Fonts and formatting

Email clients are notoriously bad with fonts and will often just display your text in Times New Roman if not coded properly. Please have a look at the the font and make sure it is how you like your font.

Sender, Reply To and Subject Line (Envelope details)

Please make sure that the email is coming from the right sender, the reply to (if needed) is setup properly and the Subject line is exactly what you want it to be.

Personalisation

If you are using personalisation in your emails (e.g. using firstnames in greetings Dear firstname), please make sure that it is working properly and displaying substituted firstnames in tests.

Unsubscribe links

Please make sure that there is a unsubscribe link in the email and it works.