What are email flows?
A sequence of automated emails known as an email flow is delivered to subscribers depending on their contact details, activity, or preferences. Together, these emails help you complete a task, like signing up for a service or making a purchase. If you want to put into practice a successful plan to convert more leads into customers, setting up email processes should be a no-brainer.
Email workflows may initiate activities and internal communications for your marketing, sales, and customer support teams to increase lead nurturing and conversion rates in addition to automating customer contacts depending on each customer’s unique reaction.
Why should you test email flows?
Monitoring your analytics is essential to determining the effectiveness of the entire process sequence with any kind of email marketing. However, these measurements get a little bit more precise with processes.
Implementing an email workflow will assist you in nurturing your leads into sales if you’re interested in developing a strong relationship with your subscribers who aren’t yet ready to invest in your business.
What to Consider
When choosing a tool that will help you test your email flows, there are some key factors or criteria you should consider. For example, you should look for user-friendly and clean dashboards and user interfaces that will make everything clear and organized. Also, your platform of choice should be effective but easy to use with great documentation which will ensure maximum usability.
Another thing you should consider is the integration efficiency which will provide opportunities to integrate with various social media platforms and email providers. Finally, you should consider the value for money of each tool and what features you will have access to with your money.
Best tools
Imitate Email
Imitate Email is a great tool for developers and teams that want to easily test email flows. It provides a sandbox SMTP server along with an embeddable web widget. All you have to do is to change your SMTP settings to match those provided by the tool and send emails as normal. With this, you can view those emails in your app as you develop it.
This embeddable widget can also be branded by your custom brand, and it supports SSO which ensures easy logon with no need for your end users to have an Imitate Email account. Whether you are a solo developer or a large team, this tool will easily scale and is great for both ends of the spectrum.
With this special offer, you will receive lifetime access to the Imitate Email subscription plan at only $49 for a one-time purchase. This will get you 3 users, 3 extra widget users, 1 mailbox per user, 5 team mailboxes, 250 daily emails, 30-day retention, message size below 10 megabytes, unbranded web widget, all future plan updates, and a 60-day money-back guarantee if you do not find this tool useful for any reason.
MailSlurp
MailSlurp is a great tool for end-to-end email testing. It is an “email as a service” tool with sandbox APIs, deliverability dashboards, auto-forwarding, webhooks, and inbox routing.
By sending actual emails to real email addresses and your application, the tool enables you to programmatically test transactional emails and basic user engagement. MailSlurp, which is primarily used by developers and QA testers, enables you to send and receive emails and attachments in code, as well as run tests using a variety of frameworks and languages, including Selenium and Jest.
To send and receive your emails at scale, MailSlurp utilizes a customized SMTP Mail Server and AWS SES. You may test user authentication, forgotten passwords, email verification, send emails to contact groups, and measure the number of times an email has been opened using real email addresses.
MailHog
MailHog is one of the best tools that is geared toward app developers. For app developers, MailHog is a tool for email testing that includes a fake SMTP server. With the help of the tool, you can set up your application to utilize MailHog for SMTP delivery, examine emails via a web interface or get them using the JSON API, and optionally send messages to actual SMTP servers for delivery.
Due to its small size and lack of installation requirements, MailHog may be used with several operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and macOS. Developers may now evaluate the ease of sending and receiving emails from a web app. Real-time updates are further provided by MailHog using an EventSource web interface. Captured emails can be saved in a MongoDB database, in-memory message storage, and a file-based stored system.
MailTrap
If you want to test email flows in a staging environment, then MailTrap is a great choice. Before test emails are delivered to actual people, the program acts as a fake SMTP server to capture them, see them in virtual inboxes, and troubleshoot them. To prevent emails from development environments from being accidentally sent to clients and other staff, MailTrap enables you to test and iterate over new emails quickly. Using an SMTP server or an API, MailTrap may be incorporated.
Bcc checking is one of several capabilities that MailTrap provides. Because Bcc is not a typical SMTP header like To or Cc, the majority of email testing programs do not support it. All Bcc’d addresses are viewable in MailTrap, which can also check if they remain hidden from the principal receivers. In addition to allowing you to conduct tests in a development environment, MailTrap also offers a configurable email address for each mailbox.
Conclusion
A more comprehensive brand communication and marketing plan should include email testing. When sending out a large number of emails to clients, these solutions are made to increase deliverability and reduce risk. Each tool also has a distinctive advantage, allowing you to choose the best option for your needs.
The above-mentioned tools are all great choices for testing email flows, so go through them and decide on the best option for your use case. We highly recommend the Imitate Email tool which has plenty of features to cover all your needs.