Every marketer invests some time into testing their campaign prior to queuing it. It is highly recommended that you test, test and test your campaign before you send it out to your subscribers in order to identify any flaws your campaign might carry. Broken hyperlinks, broken pictures, or poorly formatted text are only a few flaws your campaign might carry. You can send a test to several email addresses right from the Content tab.
Sometimes the same campaign renders differently in different email services or email clients. This happens because they use different rendering engines (also known as browser engines). The rendering engine will transform your HTML content into the visual representation of the HTML code and since there are several rendering engines out there it is expected to have minor differences.
How to minimize differences
No matter how many test campaigns you send to yourself or how many changes you make to your campaign, you will notice that sometimes it is impossible to have two identically rendered campaigns. Instead of spending huge amounts of time trying to eliminate these differences, you can try to minimize them.
The greatest advice here is to have a “nice and clean design“. Besides your campaign looking good aesthetically, simple designs help with better deliverability as well. Try to:
- minimize the number of images included in your campaign out of fear that they might not display as you wish to different email clients;
- pick a widely used font. Even though your company might use the same font for all marketing materials, it is advised that for email campaigns to stick with a “traditional” font that most likely will display properly on most email clients;
- use the same design every time. If this is not always possible, try to tweak a campaign template that rendered good in the past and based on the old one build a new one with similar traits.
Predicting how an HTML email campaign renders across different email clients or different devices is impossible, but there are small steps you can take to avoid the same campaign looking significantly different.