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Over a one-year period, we looked at over 5 million previews and QA results in Litmus and found that 96% of emails contained content errors and 75% had broken links. These issues can lead to lack of engagement, lost email revenue, and more critically, reduced brand trust.
How many times have you unsubscribed from a brand's email addresses because you kept receiving emails with erroneous messages? Or maybe you just ignore the emails from your inbox.
Making a good first impression in the inbox is crucial because it increases your chances of making a good second, third, and even more good impressions! And a rock-solid email QA testing process will help you do just that.
However, we understand that email testing can be a manual and time-consuming process that is easy to skip from time to time.
Don't skip it! Automate your email testing process instead. Litmus gives you the power to streamline and automate your email testing so you never send another failed email again.
Here are six manual email testing tasks you can automate with Litmus.
1. Improve deliverability with pre-send spam testing
Even the best copy and the most beautiful email design will have no effect if your email ends up in the spam folder. Make sure you are not on a blocklist and check that your DMARC record is set up correctly and your SPF and DKIM are properly authenticated with Litmus Spam Test. You can even use your BIMI authentication. Solve any problems before you hit send and get the most out of the email you're about to send.
Spam testing in Previews & QA lets you instantly see if your IP addresses and domain names are on blocklists and check your email's authentication. If there are any issues, we'll give you actionable advice on how to fix them. You can also send your email directly to Litmus using your unique Litmus test address to automatically run a spam test in Litmus Test!
2. Improve the accessibility of your emails
It's incredibly important that your emails are accessible to all of your subscribers. Do everything you can to reach those subscribers who rely on screen readers to read emails.
As screen readers—and listening to email on screen readers—become more popular, you should think about how your email sounds. Now it's easier than ever with accessibility testing in Litmus Previews & QA.
Litmus Previews & QA checks your email against accessible design and coding best practices—like language labels, table roles, and content hierarchy—and highlights things that could be improved. You can also hear what your email sounds like to a screen reader with an audio recording and transcript.
Don't like the way it sounds? Make the necessary changes in Litmus Builder, push your updated code into Checklist, and return to that audio recording. Litmus Checklist will update the audio recording so you know exactly how your email sounds to your subscribers who use screen readers.
3. Make sure your emails look good in all email clients
By previewing your email in different email clients before sending, you can be sure that your subscribers will have the best possible experience when interacting with your email. Don't worry, you won't have to manually preview your email in the hundreds of email clients your audience uses.
Automatically display your emails in over 100 email clients and devices by using Litmus Email Previews in Litmus Preview & QA to see how your subscribers see your emails. And by sending your email directly to Litmus using your unique Litmus test address, you can spot any rendering issues caused by code changes your Email Service Provider (ESP) has made to your email. (Unfortunately, this can happen!)
You can also simply mark problematic previews for review and then filter the previews by the previews you marked to focus your QA process.
4. Check the ALT text and loading speed
Sometimes images are too large to load properly. Your subscriber might have a less than reliable mobile network. Or you might be using retina images for high-resolution displays. Or you might be sending an email that's all images (we hope not!) – whatever the reason, you should make sure you're optimizing those images for your subscribers.
If your images take too long to load, your message may get lost and your subscribers may abandon your email without taking any action. With Litmus Previews & QA, you can check how quickly – or slowly – your images load to see if you should reconsider using certain images or compress those images.
While you can do everything in your power to optimize your images to load as quickly as possible, there may still be subscribers who have images disabled by default in their inbox. If this is the case, you'll want to make sure you add ALT text to each image that adds value to the subscriber. In Litmus Previews & QA, you can disable images to preview your email and see how it would look with the ALT text you've set up.
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5. Enable link monitoring in Email Guardian to automatically detect broken links
Let's say your email has a great subject line and you've piqued your audience's interest. They click through your email – but that click takes them… nowhere. Oops!
Litmus Email Guardian proactively monitors the links in your emails so you can identify broken links before a subscriber contacts you.
When a subscriber clicks on a link, that request is sent to the website hosting your content. If the website cannot return the content to a subscriber via the provided link, the hosted website communicates using status codes.
We'll report them back to you automatically! Email Guardian monitors your email links so you can be confident that your links will work even after testing. This is ideal for your most frequently used email templates or transactional emails that you don't do a quality check on before each send.
6. With Email Guardian you get 24/7 monitoring of your emails
Keep track of automated emails and frequently used email templates by enabling Email Guardian after quality assurance of your emails!
When you enable Email Guardian, we'll notify you of unexpected email client changes or broken/slow-loading links or images that may impact the way your subscribers use your emails. You'll also receive an email notification so you can get to the bottom of the issue, retest your emails, and continue to monitor for future changes – all within Litmus.
Automate email testing and make a great first impression
Transform your email testing process and automate these manual tasks so you have more time to perfect your email marketing strategy.
Clicking “Send” doesn't have to be stressful
See how your emails look in 100+ email clients and shave hours off your QA process with Litmus email testing. Learn more.
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Allie Sperry
Allie Sperry is a Product Support Manager at Litmus.
Create your very own Auto Publish News/Blog Site and Earn Passive Income in Just 4 Easy Steps
