E-Mail Quality Assurance -- Without Investing in Your Own Lab
Ensure your e-mail messages looks just as professional in Lotus Notes as they do in Outlook and Gmail -- without breaking the bank.
Ensure your e-mail messages looks just as professional in Lotus Notes as they do in Outlook and Gmail -- without breaking the bank.
Now that you’re sold on the benefits of email quality assurance (QA), you may now be wondering, “How do we go about working with an email QA lab? Can we do it in-house?.”
Kennis Wong, Ticketmaster’s associate email campaign manager, discussed why she chose to outsource her email QA to EnhanceRate when her email template got a “facelift” in response to a Web site makeover.
“We wanted to make sure that the template looked great on the screens of all our users. However most of our programmers use one platform, while our designers use another –and nobody uses AOL. While our programmers test in-house as much as possible for Gmail and Hotmail, we found it more cost-effective to outsource testing and allow our programmers to focus on other work.”
EnhanceRate offers a number of different testing “bundles,” including B2B, B2C, Mac, and a new Firefox/Netscape bundle, reflecting the fact the open source Firefox browser now has an impressive 5 percent market share.
Despite the fact Ticketmaster has a primarily B2C audience, many consumers receive messages through their work email address, so the company chose the B2B bundle as well. Wong says, “It was important to look good not only in AOL, Hotmail and Yahoo, but also in Lotus Notes.”
Bart Narter, EnhanceRate’s general manager, comments, “Lotus Notes has 40 percent market share with large companies. Anyone who uses Lotus Notes knows from experience that emails often do not render well, and so it is especially important to run a QA test for this corporate platform.”
How did Ticketmaster’s new email template perform? “All our emails ‘passed’ the test, but we made a point to review each environment,” says Wong. “When we did, we saw that some of the Mac emails looked funky. So we evaluated what was worth fixing vs. how many of our users actually use Macs.” The emails just went through a second round of testing and are ready to roll out this week. (Check your in-boxes, Mac users!)
So how long does all this testing take? Wong says, “The turnaround is great. I sent out the email in the morning and got results back the next day. That’s important for us since our changes have to go through our template team and we can’t afford for the process to slow down.”
EnhanceRate’s Narter offered two tips on how to assure your email looks good across multiple platforms:
With falling email deliverability rates, a small investment in email QA seems worth it to make sure your messages that do make it into your readers’ inboxes show up in a way that enhances your brand, rather than detract from it.