Testing your email campaigns is essential because it ensures that your campaign looks the way you want it to.
It’s important to test your email in Mailchimp to ensure it looks good in other email clients and browsers. Keep in mind that the appearance of your email may vary for recipients.
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Tip 1 – Verify Email Campaign Settings on the Summary Page
The first thing to test for when looking at the overall email you’re ready to send is the green check marks. You’ll have to have an audience that you’ll be sending it to, so you got the green check mark from that. In this case, the From address is from my business address, a subject, and your content. In your content, you cannot have any pre-filled content when you choose a template through Mailchimp. To make sure that’s removed, you get the green check mark.
Tracking/Analytics Options
Other things to check when you’re testing your email before you send it is if you’ve got Tracking set on. So, you can go down here at the very bottom of the page and set up your Tracking if you wish.
Campaign Link URL
The next thing you want to check is to ensure that you have an appropriate campaign link when sharing it on social media. I’ve copied an email a couple of times in the video, and it still has the old campaign URL when it says, “Interior Plants Newsletter.” So, I changed it to an appropriate link for this email. So, ensure you’re looking at all of this information on this page before sending your email.
Tip 2 – Preview Mode and Live Merge Tag
Now, let’s click on the first test of our email. Let’s click Preview.
In Preview mode, you have two options, Desktop or Mobile. Now, we do have a Merge Tag in the email. Over on the left-hand side, we have something called, Enable Live Merge Tag Info. And what that will do, if I activate that, will put in the actual name of people on your audience list so you get an idea of what it will look like. I like to click through at least three or four of these to ensure they look good.
And again, you get to check out you’re From, your Subject, and your Preview Text.
Tip 3 – Send a Test Email
The next test option that I do is to send a test email.
Clicking on Send Test Email opens a window with a field to enter email addresses. Enter the email addresses that you want to receive the test email. A suggestion here is to use more than one email provider when testing.
Use Several Email Addresses
Here’s what I do, I have several email addresses from Yahoo, Gmail, and Outlook. I want to see what each provider’s email looks like. So, I’ll enter each of those separated by a comma in the email address field to receive the test email.
You can also include instructions and a personal message to the people receiving this test email. Maybe you want them to do specific tasks within the email to make sure that, let’s say that the links are working, that type of thing. Clicking the Send Test button, you’ll see a ” “Bon Voyage, Your Test Email Is On Its Way.”
Checking Test Emails from Different Providers
Now, let’s go check out those emails. So, in Gmail, notice that the merge tag comes out as << Test First Name >>. When using merge tags through a test email, that’s what you will see. Yahoo looks pretty much the same. So, all of that looks good except the merge tag. How are we going to test the merge tag?
Thoroughly Test the Merge Tag
So, we know that the merge tag will work in principle, but I’d rather be sure. So, if you want to, my extra step here is to send the actual email campaign to yourself. And here’s how I do that. We go back to our summary of our email campaign. I have a tag connected to my contact information in the audience list that says, “Test.” I can click on Edit Recipients, select the tag Test, and then click Save. So, now I know it’s going to go to one recipient. Let’s go back into our campaigns and click on All Campaigns. Here’s the one we just sent, so how do we send it to the recipients? Click the dropdown list next to the test email, then click on Replicate. In Replicate, we want to edit the name. We’ll change the name to Ebook Segment New Tutorials because that’s an internal thing that I know to whom I’m sending this. We’ll change the recipients to the ebook and click Save. And then, we can either schedule or send it off from here. Check out this video if you’re interested in learning more about Mailchimp.