Test in the inbox, not in the preview

The Trimite test button sends the real email to your address, with the subject marked TEST. The editor preview looks almost the same, but it is not the same thing.

Open it on both screens

The email does not look identical on a computer and on a phone. The wrapper around it behaves differently on a small screen and can produce a band above the header that the preview never shows.

What only shows up in the test

The compliance footer, added automatically by the platform: the privacy policy, the unsubscribe link and data deletion.

Below it, the platform states plainly that links in a test are a sample, and that on a real send every subscriber gets their own unsubscribe link. Read that line before reporting that the unsubscribe link is broken.

What to check, in order

1. The subject and the preview text, as they appear in the email list, not in the editor. Those decide whether the email gets opened
2. The sender name, the first thing a person reads
3. The links, clicked one by one in the test email. A wrong link shows up only after sending, when it is too late
4. The images: some email clients do not load them by default, so the email has to make sense without them
5. How it looks on a phone: short paragraphs, a button big enough to press with a thumb

Send it to a colleague too

Your inbox is the only mailbox you can see. A test sent to a Gmail address and to a Yahoo one shows you whether it lands in the inbox or in promotions, which no preview can tell you.