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What are your email team’s top priorities for the upcoming year? Which email marketing tactics do you believe will move the needle toward success?

Are you striving to create high-quality content that drives traffic to your website and converts email contacts into customers?

Are you focusing on engaging email design that stands out from the competition and creates an amazing experience for your subscribers?

Is your team implementing advanced personalization into your email strategy, including features such as product recommendations, package tracking, and other real-time data?

All three of those email marketing tactics are important. Still, it’s easy for the hard work (and budget) that goes into developing and launching your campaigns to fall flat. All it takes is one unfortunate mistake.

Our report on top-tier email marketing programs, Success in the Inbox, reveals what best-in-class marketers call their top priorities. One of the questions in the survey asked email marketers which tactics they believe will improve the effectiveness of their programs.

More than two-thirds chose “better content” and “more personalization” as key email marketing tactics while 40% think improving design will lead to success.

As you can see, nestled down at the bottom of the chart at 12% is “more testing.”

Okay, let’s address the elephant in the room. Email on Acid is an email readiness platform that focuses on pre-deployment testing. So, seeing this result hurt our feelings just a bit. But we get it.

Tell us how you really feel about email testing …

Testing isn’t exactly flashy or fun. In fact, it can even be a little frustrating. You work hard to create an amazing email. Then, when you see the email previews your stomach sinks. Maybe it looks like hot garbage in Outlook, you made a bunch of typos, or your code didn’t translate well into dark mode.

That’s not a great feeling. It can even seem like your fault when it’s simply inconsistent rendering among different email clients. Even if you’re grateful that testing caught your mistakes, it’s kind of like when your friend points out you have spinach in your teeth. You’re glad she did, but it’s still a little embarrassing.

For other email marketers, pre-deployment testing feels like a chore. You’ve put in a ton of time and you’re anxious to hit that send button and get results. Why add another step? People are just going to nitpick at minor details. And, after all, you already tested this template six months ago. So, everything should be fine, right? Not always.

Don’t let overconfidence and busyness lead to costly missteps. It would be great if every email provider would send us a friendly heads up that they’re changing something about the way their platform renders email, but they don’t.

We’re here to change the way you feel about email testing! Switch your point of view and you’ll shift your priorities, too.

Put testing at the top of 2021 email marketing priorities

You can’t have a successful email campaign without quality content. That’s true.

Cutting edge email design lets you make your mark, builds your brand, and creates an unforgettable inbox experience. That’s also true.

Email personalization helps you make a meaningful connection with customers, increases loyalty, and takes your email marketing to the next level. More truth!

However, none of that will matter if your emails aren’t rendering correctly. No one will see your beautifully designed email if it ends up in the spam folder. If your content is unreadable because of email accessibility issues, your message won’t get through to everyone. And, if you’re sending out emails with broken links, you’re going to lose potential revenue. Not only that, you’ll diminish the trustworthiness of your brand. People won’t open emails that end up wasting their time.

Pre-deployment testing with Email on Acid lets you address those problems (and many more) before you hit send. That also means you’ll be protecting your investment in other important email marketing tactics.

The tools you use to develop successful email campaigns are a significant portion of your budget. Plus, you are investing your team’s time and other resources into email marketing. Don’t waste it!

Testing with a tool like Campaign Precheck, our automated pre-deployment checklist, is just like the checks NASA runs through before a launch. It’s absolutely necessary if you want to avoid disaster. Email testing isn’t a chore, and its purpose isn’t to point out your flaws, either. Think of email testing as a way to increase your confidence in hitting that send button.

Email strategy over tactics and technology

An important caveat to all this is that tactics and third-party tools are no substitute for having a rock-solid email marketing plan. That goes for Email on Acid’s tools as well. Before you work on how to deliver email perfection, decide what you should deliver to your audience and why.

Strategy needs to come first. In fact, our report identified having a documented strategy as one of the five main criteria for a top-tier marketing program. Check out our infographic on habits of successful email marketers to learn about the other four factors.

Want to find out more about how email marketers like you achieve success? What does it really look like? How do they measure it? What are their biggest challenges and most important goals?

Download our free report, Success in the Inbox: Keys to Effective Email Marketing. Dig in and discover how to take your email team’s efforts to the next level.