Email testing tools for marketers

Table of Contents

• Tools to test email content
• Grammarly
• Hemingway Editor
• Email Subject Line Grader
• HTML Email Check
• Litmus
• Tools to test deliverability
• Elastic Email
• SendForensics 
• Mail Tester
• NeverBounce
• Wrapping Up

Why do we need email campaigns? Mostly, they let businesses build trust-based relationships with users. And it’s a walk on thin ice. A successful campaign is, of course, a headway. But a spoiled one can result in hundreds or even thousands of unhappy users. That’s why it is crucial to test your emails before sending them. For this, you can make use of numerous email testing tools for developers, testers or system architects. Marketers, in turn, should keep their eyes on those related to content and deliverability.

Tools to test email content

When testing email content, you should draw attention to body copy, HTML text, and subject line. Also, it’s crucial to know how your message will look for different email clients and even devices. Today, you can find plenty of solutions to handle all this stuff. We picked the most worthwhile options and shared them with you.

Grammarly

Grammarly is a noteworthy writing assistant. It not only points out when you’ve missed an article but also detects over 400 types of grammatical mistakes. This tool is useful to increase the grammatical accuracy, clarity, and even engagement of your content. Besides, Grammarly can have your text checked by professional proofreaders. It’s a paid option, but it may be quite valuable for your email campaign.

Hemingway Editor

Hemingway Editor is the testing tool you need to increase the readability of your email content. It detects hard-to-read sentences and other complex structures. Also, it has a built-in counter of letters, words, and even the reading time. All you need to do is to paste your body text and get a Readability Grade. The lower, the better. The grade depends on the number of hard to read and very hard to read sentences. The use of passive voice, adverbs, and complex phrases also affects the readability of your content. For example, this paragraph has the grade 5 which is cool.

Email Subject Line Grader

Email Subject Line Grader not only sets a grade to your subject line but also explains what’s wrong with it. For example, the subject line ‘Tomorrow is a webinar’ got a grade 58 and the following tip: This email subject line could be improved with some words with emotion, action, or power. 

We updated the subject according to the advice and got 100 for ‘Grab a free seat in tomorrow's webinar'.

HTML Email Check

HTML Email Check lets you validate HTML markup, CSS formatting, client-specific styling, and many more. Also, the service offers a free HTML email template responsive to both desktop and mobile apps. You can verify your email campaign right away even without signing up. Also, you can switch between the HTML and Layout view for better results.

Litmus

Litmus is an email previewer that can show how your message looks across over 90 apps and devices. These include Desktop clients like Outlook and Apple Mail, multiple mobile apps, and the most widespread web clients. Litmus is a powerful solution to build, test, and monitor email campaigns. Along with email preview, you can benefit from spam testing, email analytics, and other valuable features.

Tools to test deliverability

When your message is delivered to a recipient, it’s good. But, at the same time, it can be trapped as spam, which can ruin the entire email campaign. That’s why deliverability is important. It indicates that the message came through spam filters and landed in the inbox. And here are some tools to test deliverability, spam, and email address validity.

Elastic Email

Elastic Email offers a specialized Email Verification service. It allows you to eliminate spam traps, validate email addresses, identify spelling mistakes, and many more. All these activities affect the sender’s reputation that, in turn, is crucial for deliverability. Everything is simple - the higher the reputation, the higher the delivery rate of your email campaigns.  By the way, the verification tool uses real-world data that Elastic Email acquires from sending tons of emails every day. For customer’s convenience, the service provides an API. With it, you can verify your emails with a single call. Your list of any size will be cleaned in less than 3 minutes. Hard to believe? Check it for yourself.

Once you’re done with email verification, you might be willing to make use of versatile tools for marketers. Elastic Email offers flexible pricing solutions. So, you can purchase a monthly plan based on the number of contacts you want to send emails to and the email sending limit you need.

SendForensics 

A large green button on the SendForensics homepage will run the email deliverability test. It's free, but you’ll have to sign up first. Besides deliverability testing, there is a bunch of pre-send optimization solutions. For example, you can preview our email campaign or analyze its content. Also, SendForensics can help you with post-send measurement of your emails. They provide tools for ISP reputation monitoring, live inbox placement testing, and others. "The most advanced email deliverability and engagement toolset" sounds a bit smugly. But that’s what SendForensics claim to provide. Who knows, maybe they do. The only way to find it out is to give them a shot.

Mail Tester

Mail Tester is probably one of the easiest-to-use spam checkers you’ve ever known. All you need to do is to send an email to a randomly generated email address shown on the main page. After that, push the “Then Check Your Score” button. You'll get a detailed report of what's configured properly and what's not. The goal is to achieve a perfect score of 10/10.

NeverBounce

NeverBounce is a noticeable tool for email address validation. It is used by Uber, Dell, and Indeed. The service offers an extremely fast turnaround time - 45 minutes for 100K emails and less than 10 minutes for 10K. Also, you can connect NeverBounce with almost 90 famous tools like Salesforce or SendGrid. And, of course, the promised deliverability rate is 99%.

Wrapping Up

This is a must-have toolset for any marketer who does not want his or her email campaign crashes. Of course, you may enhance these tools with other valuable options to achieve success. And don’t forget to check the email sending capability before the actual launch of the campaign.

About the author

Andriy Zapisotskyi is a Growth Manager at Mailtrap, a product that helps people inspect and debug emails before sending them to real users. He has over 5 years of experience in the field of marketing. Andriy loves to network with people. Running is his hobby and he enjoys discovering new places. You can connect with Andriy via Linkedin or Facebook