“I sent out a newsletter to 12,000 people.
The design looks broken. How can I fix this?”“The email looked fine inside Ottos editor,
how come it doesn’t look the same everywhere?”
We regularly receive questions like these from our users, and as much as we try there is no way that we can keep Ottos email designer up to date with every email client out there. Every email client use their own set of rules and ways they interpret your emails. And these rules change all the time. The best way to overcome this problem is to test your newsletters before sending them to your subscribers.
Sadly, test-sending to your own email client isn’t enough any more. You need to test your email on different devices and email clients if you want to make sure your email looks the way you want it to look. As some of our long-term users have noticed, Outlook doesn’t have the same rules as Gmail, and mobile devices don’t follow the same rules as computers. There is even a difference between tablets and cellphones.
So what can we do about this?
The best way to stay covered is to test your newsletters and events in the most common devices and email clients. This way you will cover most of your subscribers, even if it might look odd for 1%, the other 99% is covered.
Top 10 most used email clients based on 1.15 billion users. Source
Above is a top 10 list of the most used email clients in the world, based on 1.15 billion users in May 2016. The statistics talk for themselves, Apple is the most used email client, so testing your email on an iPhone before you send is a good idea.
The reason behind the difficulty of sending and testing emails on different clients is that there is no standard in email clients. Browsers like Firefox, Chrome and Edge all use (kind of) the same web standards, and they allow pretty much the same things to be viewed. Email clients is something completely different, and they all have their own rules while taking no regard to the struggles of developers and designers.
So make sure you test-send and check your emails on as many devices as you can, before going live with your newsletters and events.
If you want to dive in to the details, you can read more here:
https://litmus.com/help/email-clients/rendering-engines/