Email Testing Flow for Outreach

Any online service or store needs to communicate with its consumers. New offers, content promotion, changes in platform policies and other news need to be conveyed to the target audience. Sometimes their goal may be to engage potential consumers in a conversation for the purpose of lead generation. That is why email outreach📨 is an important component of marketing campaigns for ecommerce and traditional businesses.

The key to successful email communication with consumers or partners lies in a well-planned marketing strategy. Without one, recipients may ignore your message or show little interest in your brand. In the worst case, poorly written content or overly frequent emails could damage your brand’s reputation. Additionally, technical issues, such as delivery failures or formatting errors, can prevent emails from reaching inboxes or displaying correctly. A strategic, well-executed approach ensures your emails are engaging, professional, and effective.

To get the most out of email outreach, companies should test emails before sending them out in bulk.

In this article, we will introduce you to all the important aspects of email testing, as well as the software tools you can use for this purpose. You will learn the common mistakes that inexperienced email marketers make and how to avoid them. Our step-by-step guide will help you set up an effective email testing flow in your organization.

Key Aspects of Email Testing

Communication with potential partners and customers via email can encounter technical and non-technical obstacles. Email testing is a comprehensive procedure that should take into account all possible impediments. If your email in test mode can overcome them, you can start your marketing campaign with the help of a bulk email service. If not, do not waste your time and money. First, eliminate all the obstacles that prevent effective communication, and then resort to bulk email.

Here are some key aspects of email testing that will help you reach your target audience and convince them to take a certain action.

Deliverability

Some marketers think that crafting compelling emails is the key to a successful email outreach campaign. Sure, content is the most important factor in convincing consumers and partners. However, even the most appealing message will not achieve its goal if the recipient simply does not find it in their email inbox.

Spam filters such as DKIM, SPF, or DMARC have become powerful guardians that protect users from various emails. The first thing you need to test is the ability of your messages to bypass these filters. Otherwise, your emails may end up in users’ spam folders, going unnoticed and reducing the effectiveness of your outreach efforts.

The secret to email deliverability is knowing the criteria that email filters use to mark emails as spam. Each spam filter has its own set of criteria that helps it effectively combat mass mailings. Those that best protect users become market leaders. However, there are software tools that will help you cope with their sophisticated algorithms.

Special services will analyze your emails based on many factors that influence the decision of spam filters:

• Domain and IP reputation.If your domain or IP address has been compromised, it will be difficult to convince filters of the honesty of your intentions. Therefore, the first thing to do is to find out whether these addresses contain any negative flags that will alert spam filters.
• The content of email headers.The safety of the message can be determined by a variety of factors, including email headers. To make your emails look legitimate, you need to test them on different anti-spam software. Alternatively, you can use services that perform in-depth analytics of emails, including their metadata.
• Correctness of HTML.To create visually engaging messages, marketers use HTML emails. However, what attracts consumers can alert spam filters. Therefore, if HTML is used incorrectly, the chances of your message ending up in the spam bin are much higher.

Rendering & Display

When designing an engaging email, you must understand that not all of its elements may be correctly displayed on users’ devices. Different clients and devices may distort the layout, block images, etc. The consumer who receives the message may see something different from what the marketer sends them. Therefore, email appearance testing is also an important task before sending out mass emails. Misaligned images or broken layout can lead to low conversions and even damage the brand’s reputation. Testing email rendering will help ensure a great impression from your emails.

Engagement

To ensure your emails resonate with recipients, it’s crucial to analyze how they perceive and engage with your content. A well-crafted subject line significantly influences whether an email gets opened or ignored. A compelling subject can capture attention, while a generic one risks being deleted without a second thought.

Using A/B Testing to Optimize Email Performance

A/B testing allows you to measure which version of an email generates a higher open rate. This method applies to subject lines and email content, helping you refine your messaging for maximum effectiveness.

Steps to Conduct an A/B Test:

1. Segment Your Audience– Divide your recipients into two test groups (A and B), ensuring they are similar in size and demographics.
2. Create Two Subject Line Variations– Write one email body but use two different, engaging subject lines to test their impact.
3. Send the Emails– Deliver the same email to both groups, but assign one subject line to Group A and the other to Group B.
4. Analyze the Open Rates– Use cold email software or an email marketing platform to track engagement metrics, particularly the open rate.

Interpreting the Results

If one subject line significantly outperforms the other, it indicates what type of language, tone, or wording resonates best with your audience. Use these insights to refine your future email campaigns and increase overall engagement.

Best Practices for Reliable A/B Testing

• Ensure each test group contains at least 100 recipientsfor statistically valid results.
• Test only one variable at a time(e.g., subject line) to accurately measure its impact.
• Continue refining based on data-driven insights, not assumptions.

By applying A/B testing, you can optimize email engagement, improve open rates, and maximize the effectiveness of your outreach efforts.

When conducting this testing, do not forget about other important metrics that allow you to measure engagement:

1. CTR (Click-through rate).If you want to test the content of your message, keep track of the click-through rate. It shows what percentage of recipients clicked on your link in the message. If one of the email variants shows higher rates, then its text sounds more convincing to consumers.
2. Bounce rate.This metric allows you to measure the number of single-page sessions compared to the total number of sessions. If a user visited a page of your website and then closed it, it is considered bounced. With a high bounce rate, content marketers should take measures to optimize the website, add relevant information, CTA, etc.

Engagement Metrics Assessment

• Bounce rate 🦘 The standards for each of the indicators are not versatile but relative. For example, a web page contained valuable information that the user needed. That is why they did not need to delve into other sections of the site. But at the same time, when calculating the bounce rate, it will be coded in the same way as a web page that did not interest them at all. In general, a bounce rate of up to 40% indicates the effectiveness of the website. If this figure exceeds 55%, you should urgently take measures to optimize its content.
• Click-through rate 🎯 The CTR metrics should be assessed taking into account the industry. Do not try to focus on CTR figures that are typical for other industries. Because users react to various topics differently. For example, if you offer to follow a link to some entertainment content, they will do it more often. But if it is an offer to buy a product or service, then the CTR will be twice as low. And for the legal services industry, it will be 10 times lower, but still considered good. In general, for e-commerce, it varies from 2% to 4%, and above 5% is considered excellent. But for the entertainment industry, the lower limit of a good CTR starts at about 10%.
• Open rates ⛳ Good open rates should be significantly higher than CTR, because the number of recipients who open the email is much higher than those who click on the link. This metric also depends on the industry, but in general, a value in the range of 15% to 25% is considered normal. Indicators above this testify in favor of the effectiveness of your email outreach campaign. If you do not reach 15%, then you should work on the persuasiveness of the subject lines.

Email Testing Tools

The modern software market offers many alternatives for email testing. You can also resort to SaaS services that offer many tools for conducting effective email marketing campaigns. Testing tools are extremely important for email outreach, so each platform offers at least a minimum set of them. If you do not yet have a subscription to any of these services, consider the following alternatives.

Mailtrap

Marketing teams are well aware of this email delivery platform. It offers many useful metrics for testing and evaluating the effectiveness of email outreach campaigns. In addition, it provides subscribers with tools for sending emails and running email marketing campaigns. For email testing purposes, Mailtrap offers key deliverability metrics:

• Number of emails sent;
• Percentage of emails that reached users’ inboxes;
• Open rate;
• Click rate;
• Bounce rate.

Before sending emails to recipients, you can test them using various tools:

• HTML checker;
• Spam analysis;
• Email preview, etc.

Mailtrap’s basic plan costs only $15 per month. With minimal investment, you will receive significantly higher performance indicators for email outreach campaigns.

Selzy

Selzy excels at many email testing tasks, including A/B testing, measuring conversion rates from each link, etc. In addition to the basic metrics of email delivery and opening, clicks and unsubscribes, Selzy offers more analytics. For example, subscribers can discover the sections of the email that generate the most conversions.

Aggregated reports will give you a comprehensive comparison of different emails by many parameters. This will allow you to discover more effective options and make them the basis for email outreach campaigns.

For small mailing volumes up to 10,000 emails per month, you can use the platform’s services for free. Paid plans start at $5.25 / month, which is one of the lowest prices in the industry.

Litmus

Litmus offers to test your emails on over 100 popular email clients. This will help you find out how your recipients will see your emails. You don’t need to send emails to each client. The program does it automatically with one click. You simply choose which email clients are important for your outreach campaign.

In addition, Litmus will check all the key elements of your email before sending, such as images, links, etc. The platform will help you bypass spam filters by scanning your email and detecting weak points. They are perceived by filters as signs of spam. By fixing them, you can be sure that the deliverability of your emails will be high.

Litmus is an expensive email marketing platform, as its basic plan starts at $99 / month for an individual user. Therefore, it is worth choosing it only after you have mastered the email testing tools on more budget-friendly services.

GlockApps

If you want to test whether your emails reach their recipients or end up in spam, use the GlockApps platform. To do this test, simply send your email to the address specified on the platform. It will immediately give you the result and tell where your emails are delivered to.

Of course, this is not the only type of test you can do on GlockApps. In addition to Spam Checker, you can use the following tools:

• Domain Checker;
• TXT Checker;
• DMARC Checker;
• MX Checker.

Some email testing tools are offered for free, while for others, users must subscribe. It is also not cheap for this type of service — from $59 / month for individual use. However, for agencies, GlockApps offers a more favorable tariff plan — $129 per month with significantly higher limits.

Common Mistakes in Email Testing & How to Avoid Them

• Testing emails on a single email client or device type. A big mistake is ignoring the diversity of device types and clients that consumers use. Perhaps most of your recipients read their emails on mobile phones and use Gmail. However, by ignoring the preferences of other potential customers, marketers may miss out on conversion opportunities.
• Lack of testing with screen readers. People with disabilities♿ find it difficult or even impossible to read regular emails. To make them accessible, you should use contrast ratios, text explanations for images, etc. All this can be detected with screen readers.
• Broken links or buttons. Even if you are sure that all clickable elements of the email work, test them before sending. Any technical malfunctions can ruin the user experience and impression of your message.
• A large number of high-resolution images. In an effort to impress consumers, marketers can oversaturate an email with high-quality images. This will lead to long loading times and the recipient not waiting for the email to fully open. To avoid this, optimize images and test loading times.
• Manual testing. To save money on automated email testing services, some marketers conduct testing manually. They spend too much time on this task and make mistakes. As a result, instead of saving, they get a time-consuming process that interferes with other tasks.

Step-by-Step Guide: Building an Effective Email Testing Flow

The sequence of steps during email testing largely depends on the goals of your email outreach campaign, as well as the approach you share. If you adhere to the automation-first approach, you will try to minimize manual execution of any tasks. In this case, the time spent on testing will be significantly reduced, and the outreach campaign will start faster. However, despite all the differences in specific testing scenarios, the general algorithm is the same.

Step 1: Setting Up a Test Environment

Email testing can take place in different environments, as it happens in app development: a test environment, a staging environment, or a production environment. The choice of environment depends on what exactly you want to test ‒ technical errors, email deliverability, the impact of content on the audience, or something else:

• If testing is carried out in an isolated environment, it is called Sandbox Tests. This approach is chosen if you need to study the technical aspects of sending and delivering emails. This could be testing the performance of your email templates in different email clients, the response of spam filters, the reputation of your domain and IP, etc. Testers usually use a fake SMTP for such sandbox tests.
• Pre-production tests occur in a staging environment. They may include DNS authentication tests, checking the SMTP for increased traffic, etc.
• The production tests occur in a real environment, since their task is to evaluate the impact of various components of the email on potential consumers. For example, A/B testing is also carried out in such an environment.

Step 2: Automated and Manual Testing

The testing process can take place in two modes ‒ manual and automatic:

1. During manual testing, company specialists carefully study each component of the email in order to identify errors and bugs. This testing is important when you want to evaluate the email from a human point of view, not automated systems’. Also, if you use personalized content, manual testing is more effective. In all other cases, performing routine tasks manually is too time-consuming.
2. Automated testing is ideal for large-scale email outreach campaigns. The use of special software tools protects you from errors that often occur during manual testing. Therefore, many companies prefer to set up all testing tasks in automatic mode. Especially for testing such aspects as email deliverability, rendering across various devices and email clients, etc.

Step 3: Analyzing Results and Optimizing Performance 🚀

Once the test data is received, it’s time to filter out important insights that will help you optimize your email outreach campaign. For example, you may find that an image size is too large and negatively affects the speed at which your emails load when opening. In this case, you should reduce the number of images in the body of the email or optimize their size. If you find that spam filters are reacting negatively to your messages, you should eliminate the cause, etc.

The ultimate outcome of the testing process is improved email performance across technical deliverability and audience engagement. By refining your approach, your emails are more likely to bypass strict spam filters and successfully reach recipients’ inboxes. At the same time, compelling and valuable content increases the likelihood that recipients will open your emails, engage with the message, and click on links, ensuring a more effective and impactful email campaign.

Conclusion & Recommendations

Email marketing techniques will be effective only if the following conditions are met:

1. Your email will reach recipients and not end up in spam.
2. Its subject line will be so compelling that they will want to open and read it.
3. The content of the email will encourage them to click on the link and take action on the website.

Email marketers should pay primary attention to factors such as Deliverability, Rendering & Display and Engagement. All of them can be tested using special software tools, effective approaches and metrics.

Make a comprehensive checklist for testing emails. Follow it even if you feel like you can skip some points. Also compare your outreach email campaigns over time. This comparison will help you see important patterns that are not noticeable without taking into account historical data.

The quality of the testing stage affects lead generation, conversion, and sales. Therefore, it must be carefully executed to get the most out of your email outreach campaigns.