On July 26, we went to Modesto to support a small grassroots nonprofit, Congregations Building Community, start an email newsletter for their organization. They are doing amazing work in the community and want a place to share it with their supporters.
A critical part of starting or sending an email newsletter is testing it in various places across the internet. This can be a time consuming step, but is really important to make sure emails are properly getting to people.
When people receive your emails, the formatting can look different than intended based on what program is used to read your emails.
To reduce the chance for error, you can test an email newsletter in multiple accounts to try to gain the perspective of what the users will receive on their end. To start, it’s important to view the test email in not only various hosted email accounts (like Gmail) but also local email clients (Outlook) and different browsers (Mozilla Firefox).
Where I Test My Email Newsletters:
Hosted Email Accounts:
- Your organization email account
- Gmail
- Yahoo
- AOL
- Hotmail
Local Email Clients:
-
Microsoft Outlook (Beware: Outlook reads your email formatting different than most programs, but it is currently the top used email service so make sure to test!)
- Mozilla Thunderbird
Browsers:
- Mozilla Firefox
- Google Chrome
- Microsoft Internet Explorer
Other Tips:
- Testing newsletters can be exhausting. Make it easier by setting yourself up on your computer to be able to test your newsletter. Some ways to start:
- Create a “test” email account for each email service that your organization does not currently have.
- Download multiple browsers on your desktop so you can view with ease.
- Open an outlook and thunderbird account - even if you don’t use them yourself - to check the newsletter.
- This is not a complete list of places to check. Look at the most common email account domains on your current email list to help guide what test accounts you should also include (i.e. sbcglobal.net, comcast.net, Apple Mail, iPhone, mobile devices)
Where do you test your email newsletters? Any other suggestions?
Share below!