Email Testing and Best Practices: Ensure Your Messages Reach the Right Inbox Every Time

Email marketing is a powerful way to connect with your audience, but challenges like distorted layouts in Outlook, undelivered messages, and unengaged subscribers can derail your campaigns. These issues impact not only how your emails look but also their deliverability and sender reputation. At University Relations, we offer tools like Litmus to test and optimize your emails, ensuring they render perfectly across devices and reach your audience. Whether you’re troubleshooting formatting issues, fixing data extension errors, or improving engagement, our tips and solutions will help your email campaigns succeed.

Does your email formatting look off?

Do your emails sometimes look slightly (or drastically) different depending on which software or device you are using? Does your email look extremely wide for users of Outlook? If so, University Relations has a Litmus subscription we can use to test your emails. Please review this information and fill out the request form to have your email tested. Someone will review your test, send you the full report, and provide recommendations to make your email more uniform and accessible across all devices.

Is your message not getting to all your subscribers?

From our FAQ, if your message is getting delivered to far fewer recipients than you have on your data extensions, “People have either unsubscribed to your Publication List or they have unsubscribed to your business unit, or they are in a Bounce or Hold status. Also, check to make sure the email address field in your data extension is set to the data type of EmailAddress.”

Another issue may be if you have anything other than email set as the subscriber key. If you choose ‘first name’ as a subscriber key in a data extension, your messages will probably not go to the correct person, and will instead go to the first person it finds in the system with that matching first name. Additionally, ensure the email field in the data extension is set to the ‘EmailAddress’ data type and not ‘Text’. Note: DMS-sourced data extensions use their own subscriber key.

Do you have trouble importing into Data Extensions?

If you are having trouble importing a .csv into a data extension or the number of entries are not matching up, first review the Data Extension Import Notification email you received after the import completes. Attached to this email is a report that lists all the errors and at which line they were encountered during the import. The most common issues are:

• Improper email address.
  • A random space at the end of an email address will cause issues.
• Wrong number of data fields.
  • If a required data field is missing or an extra is added, the row will be skipped.
• Spaces in data or header fields.
  • If you have not checked, “Respect double quotes as a text qualifier,” fields with spaces will cause errors (someone with two last names).
  • If a space is included at the end of a header field in your .csv file, SMC is not able to match the header correctly.

Did you know the audience you send to can affect all other units that use Marketing Cloud? 

Even though we have separate Business Units in SMC, units share sending IPs and a sender reputation. When our sender reputation is damaged due to sending to “bad” addresses and spam traps, our sending IP is blocked by domains such as Microsoft, Yahoo, and Apple mail. It is important to only include engaged email addresses in your audiences. You should identify and remove unengaged subscribers from your data extensions, lists, and sends. By following these practices, you are promoting the health of all of the units that use the University of Minnesota's Marketing Cloud.

If you have any questions or future topic ideas, please contact urweb@umn.edu.