Email Marketing Mistake #1: You Don’t Preview Your Emails

Post #1 in a series on the email marketing mistakes I see in the real world. This one drives me absolutely insane. Watch the video, listen to the podcast, or read the transcript below.

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Transcript

Hi there, and welcome to the YouTube channel for the Email Marketing Gal. I am Jennifer Roland Cadiente, and I’m the Email Marketing Gal. Today, I want to talk about something that I have been seeing a lot, and it makes me think that people are not testing their emails for different platforms before they send them.

So I’ve gotten emails where the text is super, super tiny on my phone. They look fine on my computer if I read emails there, but 90% of the time, I’m not reading emails on my computer. I’m reading them on my phone.

And if the text is coming through at like six point on my phone, that is just not readable for me. And a lot of them, like even when I flip my phone sideways, you know, they don’t expand. They just stay in this little tiny, tiny thing with teeny, tiny text.

So I want to talk about how to preview. One way that I do it is just to send a test email, and you can do that in, you know, any of your email marketing programs. Let’s see, I’m going to share my screen.

Okay, so if you see, send a test email. So I’m here, I’m in MailChimp on this one. So you send a test email, send it to yourself, then look at it on different devices.

If you don’t, you know, you don’t have your phone with you or what have you. When you get it in your email, say getting your web browser, you can make it make your web browser smaller so that it starts to look like a phone, and that that can give you a good idea of what, what it looks like. The other option is to preview.

So all of the email programs have this. So it shows you what it looks like on desktop and on mobile. And again, you can also send a test email from this one.

It shows what it looks like in an inbox. That is usually, you know, something where you might have to pay more and upgrade your, your service. So, let’s see.

So this is in Kit, and it has the same option here to preview. It shows you what it looks like if, you know, someone clicks that link to look at the web browser version, your email, in your phone, and see these, these are reasonable. You know, if you look at, look at the way that the text looks, that’s something that someone can read.

I’m getting, you know, I get these, they’re just tiny. And I think that people have chosen designs that are not mobile responsive, and then they’re not testing them. I’m going to go ahead and stop the sharing.

And it just makes the email unusable for, you know, for me. And I don’t know if it’s because I keep my phone on dark mode, if that makes it, you know, less easy to, to change, you know, based on how the person has designed the email. But sometimes I feel like, you know, we spend a lot of time designing things, so they look good, you know, in our, our own browser, and not enough time making sure that it’s going to work for everyone.

So, preview, send yourself a test email, see what it looks like. Let’s see if I can, so like, you know, if you look at that, like that text is tiny. And it doesn’t change when I flip my phone to the side.

And it’s, I’ve gotten that from, you know, from multiple lists that I’m on and, you know, I like to be on a lot of lists because it’s good research for me. So if you have any questions about, you know, how to preview in the specific, you know, email marketing program that you’re using, go ahead and shoot me an email at jen@emailmarketinggal.com Or you can find me at email marketing gal. It’s just, you know, click the, click the links in the comments area or the description of the video.

And if you would like to keep up to date on what I have to say about email marketing, go ahead and like and subscribe. I’ll see you next time.