Blog Email Marketing and SMS

Why forwarding email is not a good idea

Imagen Why forwarding email is not a good

When we prepare email marketing campaigns is very common to have to send a test campaign to our customer, coworkers or boss before making the final sending to our newsletter subscribers.

As a rule, we usually send to ourselves the campaign and then, from our mail client, we forward it to the appropriate person for review.

And that's when the problems start: the recipients often say that the email design is broken, the links do not work, etc.

Assuming that your newsletter is well designed and ready to be displayed properly on any device, if you face this problem you should know that the culprit is the mail reader.

When you clic on "forward message", mail readers make modifications in your message code before forwarding it, instead of forwarding the message you received as it is. At other times, the culprit is the mail reader of the receiver, that makes modifications to the code when receiving.

See some examples:

Imagine that we have in our well coded email, responsive and that we have tested in all types of mail readers and devices, a block of three columns like this:

Imagen

When Gmail forwards the message to an Outlook 2007 user, breaks the block of three columns we send:

When we forward from Outlook 2007 to Office 365, modifies the vertical alignment of our columns:

From Outlook.com or Office365 to Yahoo!, button styles are lost:

We could continue with many more examples, but the idea is clear: forward an email from our mail reader is not a good idea.

Then, how must we do it?

If we want to send an email for its validation and be sure it will look exactly as we have encode it, we have several options:

Test email: Create in our email marketing tool a test list with the email adresses of everyone who should receive the email to validate it, and send the campaign normally.
Screenshot: We send the campaign to our mail reader and make an screenshot to refer it to the responsable.
View in browser: Share the link "View in Browser" from our newsletter
Specific tools: Make an email test with a tool like Litmus, which allows validate the design in multiple readers and share the reports' results.
Share html: Another option is to send the campaign in a html file as an attachment to our message so that recipients can open and view it in their browser.

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