Arial Software Email Marketing Articles You Can Use
Testing Your Email Message Delivery
When it comes to using an installed email marketing software solution, your best delivery option is through an SMTP mail server. Typically, when you sign up with an Internet Service Provider (ISP), they provide a number of email addresses you can use plus use of their outgoing (SMTP) mail server.
Most email marketing professionals agree that one of the most important habits to incorporate into your email marketing is the message test.
Test the message for how it appears across multiple email clients. Test the server to make certain that it was not added to a block list since the last campaign. Test the connection to the database to ensure that the filters and queries that are in place are pulling the correct record set. Test everything.
Con guring test email accounts
The easiest way to test your message across multiple email clients is to sign up for every popular email account available. These include MSN Hotmail, Yahoo!, Gmail, AOL, Lycos and MyWay. Using an advanced web browser with the ability to remember usernames and passwords saves time; setting up all the accounts with the same user name and the same password makes this task even easier. Bookmark all the web email accounts for easy access from your web browser.
In your test email list, you should also add any company email accounts that are available for testing. Personal accounts set up through paid ISPs like Cox, Comcast or others should be included as well. You should be using Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Eudora Mail and other popular email clients to check your test email accounts.
Setting up a test database table
Copy the table structure of the primary production table, and create a test table. It should be the same structure as the primary table, to ensure that there are no issues on the database side of things. Add all of your test addresses to the test table. Be sure to include some emails addresses that will absolutely fail, some from inside the company domain, and some from the domains of the test accounts. These messages will help when testing the bounce feature. Using a random selection of characters in the name portion of the email address should suffice. You might also add some poorly formatted email addresses, simulating what users might actually input into your database. (If these are not allowed during sign up to your email message, or if a double opt-in process is in place, testing for bad formats may not be necessary.) If you are using an alternate write back table, make a copy of it too, to ensure that the write back methods are working properly.
Setting up a test campaign
Create a new campaign specifically for testing. If there is already a production campaign set up, copy it, indicate in the rename that it is a test, and simply switch the new campaign to the test table using the Datasource tab. Preview the list on the Datasource tab to ensure the proper table and addresses are selected. Use this campaign to test new messages, subject lines, or anything else that changes before the campaign goes out live.
You should also use the test campaign to verify advanced SQL statements, views and queries, to ensure that the proper data is collected. Since this is a test table, it is safe to run the campaign to all the email addresses in the list. Check each email account to see how the message comes across, as various clients treat the messages differently when they are displayed. Adjustments can be made based on those discoveries.
It is important to set up a separate bounce account for your test campaign to ensure that the production table's bounces still record properly. Once you are satisfied with the test campaign, you can move to the production campaign, and simply connect it to the test table in the database to finalize everything before the live send. Making a seamless switch from the test table to the production table is made simpler by mimicking the production table when configuring the test table.
