There’s more to developing email templates than picking a good format that is likely to work across the majority of email servers. Always take extra steps to ensure that your email design and email layout really are as deliverable as they can possibly be. How do you do that? Simple. You test it out.

We’re not talking about testing deliverability by trying out different corporate email signature templates and seeing which ones the email analytics confirm hit their mark successfully. What we mean is that you have to test it for yourself by being on both the sending and the receiving end. If you think that we’re implying you open up a test Yahoo, Gmail, or Hotmail account to do so, you’re absolutely right. You’ll also want to test it out using Outlook in various configurations.

Isn’t this terribly time consuming? Moderately. But it is a crucial step to developing email templates that are highly deliverable.

Putting yourself in the actual role of recipient will do something for you that a lot of email design programs can’t do, which is to help you see with your own two eyes what’s coming through on the receiving end. By doing this, you can make necessary changes to boost your email delivery rates like crazy.