A Designer's Guide to HTML Email

Part III—The Final Testing Phase

Okay, so you have a template that appears to be behaving itself in your smaller test group. It’s probably time to bite the bullet and go to an email testing service. We’ve used Campaign Monitor but I know that MailChimp runs an excellent equivalent service too.

After uploading and importing your HTML, the Campaign Monitor service allows you to test your template in around 20 different mail clients—although at busy times some clients have been known to time out.

However, keep in mind that a single set of tests costs around $5.00 and can take up to an hour to generate, so you would want to be fairly confident your template was close to finished before starting this stage of testing. This is not a time for incremental tweaking.

The Campaign Monitor test suite breaks down into three major groups:

Web-based email clients

• AOL Web
• Comcast
• Earthlink
• Gmail
• Mail.com
• MSN Hotmail
• Windows Live Hotmail
• Yahoo! Classic
• Yahoo! Mail

Desktop email clients

• AOL 9
• Lotus Notes 6.5.4
• Outlook 2003
• Outlook 2007
• Outlook Express 6
• Outlook XP
• Thunderbird
• Windows Mail (actually, what is that?)

Mobile email clients

• Blackberry
• Windows Mobile 5
• Windows Mobile 6

We also had our own Apple Mail clients and iPhones available to test the design.

While this certainly seems like a pretty comprehensive test list (especially compared to the five or six browsers you might typically test a web design on), it’s still not quite enough for you to let your guard down—as we found out the hard way.

As we were preparing to send the first edition of the new Tech Times template, Matt still reported seeing serious layout issues in Gmail. Yet I’d put quite a lot of time into smoothing over the Gmail issues and could see none of the problems he was reporting.

After arguing over IM for about 30 minutes, we realized that I was viewing the template in Gmail in Firefox, and he was viewing the same template in Gmail in Internet Explorer 7!

Cue sound of small denomination coin falling.

Of course, this is common sense when you think about it, but it effectively means you really need to see four versions of each of the nine web-based clients tested—each webmail client in Firefox, IE7, Safari, and Opera.

Starting to feel warm and fuzzy about IE6 yet?

I thought so.

Summary

Despite its many detractors, HTML has its place in email. RSS isn’t going to kill it. Neither is spam fear.

At SitePoint, we still see thousands of new subscribers to our newsletters every single month. And those subscribers still always choose HTML over plain text at a rate of 15-20 to 1.

And there have been no signs of decay in those figures over time.

In short, while we might not like it, your clients probably prefer HTML email, and so does their audience.

So stick with the templates, keep it as simple as possible, and test early and often.