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One of the quintessential parts of a successful email marketing campaign is making sure that it is accessible to everyone you send it to. QA is one of the major steps marketers take to ensure that recipients are able to not only read your message to them, but also take action. But like so many terms, it isn’t necessarily evident what it means--or how it works. Site Impact is always invested in making marketing jargon as clear as possible, so today we’re going to tackle this subject.
To begin, QA stands for Quality Assurance, which is a separate process from another set of tests that marketers do: split testing. Where split testing gauges the performance of particular factors compared to each other, QA testing serves the purpose of making sure that every aspect of the emails you send come across properly and act the way they should for all of your recipients. This includes preview text, fonts, headers and footers, hyperlinks, and any rich content such as images or video or animations. By making sure that these will all work for all users, you eliminate these factors as possible sources of lower performance.
As mentioned before, QA testing is all about making sure all of the elements of your email campaign function properly across all devices and platforms. With that in mind, QA usually covers specific territories, looking at individual elements. Those elements include:
â— Preview text
â— Copy font(s)
â— Hyperlinks and alt text
â— Headers and footers
â— Images
â— Video (as necessary)
â— Grammar
There are more factors that you can test, if you so desire, but these are the major ones, and cover the majority of cases. All are important because if these elements don’t come across properly, it can give a faulty impression of your brand to your recipients, which leads to lower opens and clicks.
Knowing what to test is the first step. Knowing how to do QA testing is just as important however. There are a few different methods that you can use to make sure everything renders properly, and comes across the right way. One way is to send your email out to people on various devices for them to check; this method has the benefit of being low-cost, if time-consuming. The goal of course is to make sure that every element renders properly and quickly. Another popular method is to use QA software tools; many email marketing providers have services built-in with their products. This is potentially the more expensive option, but it is much easier and less time consuming.
QA is an important step in the process of making an email marketing campaign reach its highest potential. It can seem daunting, but it definitely makes a difference. Whether you use the low-tech or more streamlined process for QA, it will make a major difference in your email marketing ROI. Contact Site Impact to hear how we can take the mystery out of QA testing and make everything go smoothly.
