Which email clients should we design and test for?
It’s important to agree the target email clients you want the email to be displayed in when briefing an agency to develop a new email template or enewsletter layout. Of course, large volume senders will want the email to render in all, but for smaller businesses it’s safe to target and test a smaller number.
Traditionally the main ones to target are the main webmail services plus different Outlook versions.
- Hotmail
- Yahoo! Mail
- Gmail
- Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010
B2B marketers will probably have added different versions of Lotus Notes and Blackberry.
To find the popularity of the different clients, it’s worth checking out the market share. Litmus, the email preview company has a useful review of the most popular email clients from 2010.
This compilation shows that the ones most companies should check for are as above, but Apple Mail and iPhone are getting more important and perhaps surprisingly are more important than Gmail, so those should definitely go on the list to target and test against too.
Mark Brownlow has written a companion post comparing email preview software tools.
