The Value of an Enterprise Email Testing Service for Marketing Teams
- Updated on: 2020-04-11
- Read original article here
This isn’t just your mom & pop shop’s email testing service. This is enterprise email testing for marketing teams.
Email on Acid is a complete email content checking and testing platform that inspects and polishes every inch of email before deployment.
Email testing platforms exist so that email marketing teams can effectively QA marketing emails in less time, reduce errors, and ultimately increase each email’s ROI.
If you already have a team of email marketers whose job it is to thoroughly QA every email before it goes out, then why is so it important to have an email testing service? Because some of the most important email elements to QA can be the least apparent, the most time-consuming, and have the greatest impact on email ROI. That’s why having an enterprise email testing service is crucial to your bottom line.
Email QA aside, another reason for an enterprise email testing service is to run a live test of what the email will look like for subscribers, regardless of which email client they use or the device they’re on.
Having a streamlined email content checking workflow can save your team hours of manual checks, avoid errors, ensure every email connects with visually impaired subscribers (up to 15% of your brand’s email list), and give your team a place to work collaboratively and efficiently on an email. As a result, your email marketing ROI will improve.
Email QA isn’t limited to checking for functional links, appropriately sized images, and previewing the mobile version on an ESP.
Reviewing email content manually can be supremely time consuming and inefficient, less thorough than a service, and more prone to human error. All of these contribute to hindering an email’s ROI.
Simply put, not having an email testing platform is far more costly to an enterprise brand than having one.
Your organization would never dream of asking their accountants to do manual bookkeeping. Why put your email marketers in the same position? There are efficiencies and higher-earning opportunities that come with having an email testing service.
Your email marketing team can vouch for how time consuming it is to review and polish every email. An email testing platform will check each element, down to the HTML, in a matter of minutes. While adapting to a new workflow will take a couple emails at most, your team will experience an immediate jump in productivity and turnaround time.
Saving hours on every email provides a brand with the flexibility to get hyper-strategic with its email program, increase sending volume, and even deploy highly segmented emails with tailored content that generate a higher return.
Time consumption aside, manual email review is susceptible to human error. Despite an email marketer’s best efforts to catch every issue, some are always going to slip through the cracks.
In fact, some of the most often-skipped manual content checks are the ones that are the riskiest to do by hand—such as accessibility optimizations. On top of that, it’s exceedingly difficult for an email marketing team to efficiently do deliverability checks.
Email on Acid checks every domain in an email against 72 of the most popular blacklist sites, and even runs a spam test of every email to ensure it won’t land in the spam folder. These checks alone would take days for any email marketing team to complete. And without them, no one can say for sure how likely it is that your brand’s emails will land in the inbox.
Sending out better quality email protects your brand’s reputation amongst subscribers, as well as spam filters.
Earlier, we mentioned that about 15% of any email subscriber list lives with a visual impairment. As such, brands must connect with those subscribers just as meaningfully as everyone else. A recent survey on our website found that 70% of marketers are actively looking to make their emails more accessible.
Accessibility checks are rapidly becoming a part of brands’ email workflows. A marketing team has no way to efficiently scan every line of an email’s HTML, especially if they’re not coders.
Email on Acid’s accessibility checks review an email’s readability for screen reader users and color blindness. By adjusting the HTML to sound pleasant on a screen reader and checking color contrast ratios against WCAG AA standards, every email can meaningfully connect with visually impaired subscribers. In turn, this keeps your brand competitive against those that don’t.
Your email marketing team can easily make ADA-compliant click-to-fix HTML adjustments to resolve any issues, rather than tediously reading the code line by line.
‘Time is money’ may be a cliché, but it’s still true. Consider everyone on your email marketing team. When you think of their annual salaries on the scale of an hourly rate, chances are it costs your marketing budget way more to pay them to manually QA every email than what just a month of Email on Acid costs.
Email on Acid is one of the most competitively priced options available. We would know, we’ve done the leg work. A monthly or even annual membership will likely only cost a fraction of what it currently costs your department to manually QA emails. And that’s not even taking into account the ROI improvements your emails stand to gain.
Having one central platform for your team to work and collaborate on emails is what makes everything so seamless. Upon finalizing the design and content of any message, your team can send a share link with all the previews to whoever needs to see it—you, clients, other stakeholders, anyone. And they don’t need a login. Anyone with the link to email previews can see them, make drawings on email screenshots and leave notes, making it easy to gather feedback from multiple sources in a streamlined fashion.
Once everyone contributes their feedback, the editing marketer can efficiently implement them and re-send the link for another review.
There’s something else you should know about Email on Acid’s email testing service.
In contrast to other email testing services, Email on Acid does not use emulated email tests. Emulated tests are best guesses at what an email will look like on a client.
Email on Acid uses live tests instead. That means every time your team runs an email test, it sends the email to actual email clients and devices, which then generate a live preview of what the email will look like and send it back to you for review. This ensures your team can make any necessary client- or device-specific adjustments so the email will render properly for all subscribers.
Plus, it gives email marketers the freedom to get creative and try new things, knowing that they’ll have a true understanding of what it will look like. Emulated email tests, on the other hand, only provide a guess at what an email might look like.
We get it, you can’t just start signing up for any platform that comes across your desk. But think of those accountants if they didn’t have the tools they need to keep the books accurate.
Here are common concerns we often hear from Marketing department leaders:
Again, consider the salaries of your email marketing team on an hourly scale. Now multiply that times the number of hours it takes them to get an email ready. If it’s more than a single day, which is the case for the vast majority of email marketing teams, an Email on Acid membership will pay for itself several times over.
Yes. Even the slightest code change can cause rendering problems on an email client or device. Content checking and testing each email before deployment allows your team to know they’re sending a polished gem to every subscriber. It’s also why live email tests are more reliable than emulated.
Of course. We want to make sure your team gets the most out of their workflow, so we’re easily reachable via our in-app messaging service, email and phone. Email on Acid’s five-star customer service routinely achieves 90% and higher in customer satisfaction ratings.
If you’ve been challenging your team to achieve new benchmarks in email opens, engagement, clicks, conversion, whatever it may be, give them the enterprise email testing platform they need to make it happen.
Email on Acid is a full-service content checking and testing platform that allows email marketing teams to:
You, or anyone on your team, can sign up for one of our Weekly Product Webinars to see our platform in action. Or, you can schedule a meeting with our team for a one-on-one chat. We would be delighted to show you the value Email on Acid can bring to your specific organization and team.
