Inbox Roundup: To test or not to test?

Clearly, as an email marketer for 7 years, I firmly believe in the medium.  Email is the epitome of direct marketing - incredibly customisable, timely and measurable.  And it's also incredibly simple to execute.

This power and simplicity is obviously a recipe for disaster.  In a matter of seconds, you can not only make your brand look silly, but also cause PR nightmares (or dreams, depending on how you spin it).

I think there's really no reason to send your email campaign without testing it - aside from laziness.  Maybe when people think email testing, they think about the more complicated optimisation excercises such as A/B split and multivariate testing etc and their eyes glaze over.

But here all I'm going to focus on is something far more fundamental and simpler to understand.  The layout and design.

With the plethora of tools available online such as Previewmyemail.com, Litmus and Return Path, to name a few, it's a wonder that things like this from Wotif can still make it through to my Inbox.

Clearly someone hasn't bothered to take a look at this in Gmail and see that it's all over the place.  A quick look points to the fact that someone wacked in a extra vertical blue border to the right of the banner which has blown everything else out.

Using one of the tools above would have identified this very quickly and not made the Wotif people look silly.

To test or not to test?  Is that really a question?

buzz-sted!

Sometimes people don't quite appreciate a surprise as much as you might think.

I think this was the case with Google when they decided to Buzz us gmail users recently.

Seems the community decided that getting auto subscribed with no user input, plus making it difficult to change settings and figure out what is public or not, was a bit too, um, surprising?

So Google has decided to backtrack and fix a couple of settings to be more obvious. Perhaps something they should have done in the first place?!

Wondering how much of this negative feedback was via Buzz itself?...

Buzz?

Google Buzz - Google's answer to twitter?

All this Wave, Gmail, Buzz stuff coming out of the same place is really starting to get confusing.

Am I alone in thinking that they seem to just be pushing out stuff without really much though to how it all fits together and, more importantly, how people are going to use it?