In this case, your children are your emails. Last time we talked about watching out for formatting gotchas. You know the best way to do that? Read your own emails on every platform and provider possible. Services like AOL, GMail, MSN (Hotmail), and Yahoo all provide free email addresses to anyone just for the asking. There are others too, so find as many as you can. Sign up for an address with all of them with a name something like YourCompanyNameEmailTest. And then just use that email address for testing purposes.
Once you have the email address you can do multiple things. First, and often the most important, you can simply see if you email gets through. Maybe AOL is blocking all emails coming from your company as spam and you don’t even know it. You will if you send an occasional email to your test AOL address and see if you get it. If you don’t, you know there is a problem.
Second, you can see how your emails look in each of these service’s different web based email clients. Trust me, AOL will format differently from Hotmail and different from Yahoo. And don’t forget to try your own providers web based email and a mobile phone based email if you can.
Finally, with most of these services you can attach Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, and many other client based email clients to the service to retrieve the email. Do that to. You want to do it just to make sure your images and formatting come through. You also want to know if any of these combinations result in any of your messages be unceremoniously being dropped into the spam bucket.
If you do the simple action of testing your email broadcasts you will solve 90% of your problems before your prospects ever notice them. Or at least you will know about them and can start to work on solving them, because your prospects will never tell you. In most cases they won’t even receive the offending email, so they simply can’t tell you.
