20+ Best Email Testing Tools You Should Try Right Now

Nowadays, almost all businesses come out of the traditional marketing approaches and adopt digital marketing channels, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube. However, in this super-fast wake of social media marketing and online ads, email marketing still gets the number one priority amongst business owners.

Email marketing boasts a 4400% ROI ($44 for every $1 spent). So, it’s normal that 81% of B2B marketers love email marketing for sending content and newsletters. (Statistics compiled by AVADA Commerce)

But what makes it more popular also increases the competitions and challenges. To sustain in the big game, you must ensure that every single email lands in the recipients’ inboxes.

That’s why before sending, you need to test your emails and implement such tools in your email marketing process. This blog post can help you find the best email testing tools out there. Let’s get going!

What is email testing?

Let’s start by defining email testing. As its name suggests, email testing refers to the process of looking over your emails and testing them in advance to ensure that they are flawless before you hit the “Send” button.

You should be double-checking for typos and misplaced commas, but there are more critical elements that you need to scrutinize, such as:

• Spam testing
• Link validation
• Image and format rendering

Email testing is not just about avoiding adverse outcomes. It’s about improving your customer experience. High-quality emails lead to incredible customer experiences, and this, in turn, leads your recipients to open and click your emails more. Higher engagement will lead to a better sending reputation, and a better sending reputation increases your email deliverability.

Why should you use an email testing tool?

An email testing tool makes the above process much easier and faster. With the help of a reliable email testing tool, you can make sure your emails display properly across email clients and mobile devices.

There are many factors that affect your email campaign’s success; from deliverability to your email list’s quality to technical issues. If you don’t know which issues increase your email bounce rate, it’s quite impossible to find a way out.

There are many email testing tools available out there - each with its own characteristics and specialties. Thus, we have assembled a list of the best options for each purpose.

For your convenience, we have categorized the list based on the tool’s primary function. Move on to the next section to explore!

20+ best email testing tools

5 Email Testing Tools to validate an email address

Validating an email address is a multistep process of checking whether an email address is valid and deliverable or not. The following tools help you do that without sending any test emails.

Firstly, these tools examine addresses for proper syntax and formatting. Next, verifiers validate domain name and mail exchanger (MX) records. Lastly, they ping each email address with a simple technical request in order to authenticate if it exists on the server and can receive emails.

1. Zero Bounce

Zero Bounce is one of the popular options for SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) and large organizations alike. According to their words, Zero Bounce email validation API offers a 360-degree report view of any email list, covering more than 30 status and substatus codes. This helps you make the right decision to send an email to a specific address or not.

To validate your email list, upload it to Zero Bounce as a CSV or TXT file. If you upload a multi-column file, you will need to verify and correct variables for all the columns. Upon hitting the “Process File” button, your email list goes queued for further validation, and you have to wait for your turn to get the results.

The tool returns you the file with various deliverability statuses:

• Valid for addresses that are safe to email to
• Invalid for addresses that should be deleted
• Catch-all addresses that are impossible to validate without delivering an actual email
• Abuse for addresses known to click abuse links in emails
• Unknown for addresses that haven’t been validated due to multiple reasons

If needed, you can download the file by clicking on it.

Pricing plans:

• Free Plan (for 100 emails)
• Pay-as-you-go Plan: from $0.008/ mail
• Monthly Plan: from $0.0075/ email

2. Clearout

We chose Clearout thanks to the combination of consistent performance and affordable pricing. Its email list verification can help clean your list of duplicates, mistyped domain names, and even up to 50% of invalid addresses.

You can use Clearout to validate up to 10 email addresses with Quick Validation or add a list in XLSX or CSV format to validate your database in bulk. For each email address validated, you’ll be charged 1 credit. Once you have added the list, click “Verify” and wait for the results. You can see them in the same window when the validation is over.

Pricing plans:

• Pay-as-you-go Plan: starts from $0.007/ credit
• Subscription Plan: starts from $31.5/ month for 5,000 credits (monthly plan); from $23.2/ month for 5,000 credits (annual plan)

3. Email Verifier by Snov.io

In order to use Email Verifier by Snov.io, sign up and upload a list of email addresses you need to validate. The tool will check as many email addresses as your credit balance allows, charging 0.5 credit for each email verified.

Once the process is over, you’ll get a list of contacts marked with icons of different colors, including green for valid email addresses, yellow for catch-all, and orange for invalid.

Pricing plans (paid monthly):

• S Plan: $39/ month
• M Plan: $79/ month
• L Plan: $169/ month
• XL Plan: $289/ month
• XXL Plan: $578/ month

4. Debounce

Debounce is a simple, accurate, and fast email validation and verification platform, which offers a deliverability guarantee of 97.5%.

The tool has validated more than one billion email addresses so far. Plus, Debounce provides over 50 integrations and can connect, validate, and update the email lists from many integrations, such as MailChimp, Sendinblue, Mailerlite, and more.

It is designed to remove invalid, disposable, spam traps, and role-based emails from your lists. Debounce can also validate some of the accept-all and hard-to-validate email servers, such as G-Suite, QQ, free.fr, Web.de, and more.

Pricing plans: starts from $0.002/ verification

5. QuickEmailVerification

The tool offers online email list cleaning in bulk using real-time verification and batch processing. Due to its accuracy, speed (about 200,000 emails verified in under 3 hours), and relative affordability, QuickEmailVerification becomes one of our top picks as an email verifier.

Its email verification process incorporates 7 different validations, including syntax validation and the checking of mailbox existence. In the end, you’ll receive a detailed report with all safe-to-send emails.

To date, QuickEmailVerification has powered more than 70,000 businesses worldwide - from SMBs to Fortune 50 companies - with its deliverability solutions.

Pricing plans:

• Pay-as-you-go Plan: starts from $4/ 500 credits
• Daily Plan (paid monthly): $0/ 100 credits, starts from $25/ 500 credits/ day

5 Email Testing Tools to check sender reputation

Sender reputation refers to a score that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) assign to a specific sender. This score can influence the way mailbox providers perceive your emails and filter them to different folders - inbox or spam - or reject them at all.

In order to get an overall picture of how ISPs see you as a sender, you can keep an eye on some factors, such as opens and clicks, spam complaints, spam traps, bounces, and others. But to gain more precise insights, you can take advantage of some handy email testing tools.

6. Sender Score

Sender Score is a simple tool that checks your sender reputation, identifying it with a number from 0 to 100. Actually, you can get a partial report on your sender reputation without registering. But if you want to get a comprehensive report, you need to register and confirm your email first.

Both reports give you the score of your reputation, general information about the IP address, and a graph of your score in correlation to your sending volume, all within the last month.

Pricing plan: Free

7. Trusted Source

Trusted Source is run by McAfee and provides reputation scores for not only IP addresses but also for URLs, domains, and web/ email content.

The tool gives you a trust rating for both your mail server and domain name, as well as email and web content. In general, you will be able to see whether your recipients trust your emails.

Pricing plan: Free

8. Talos Intelligence

Much like Sender Score, Talos Intelligence can check your domain or IP address. You just need to paste one of these parameters to the action box, and the tool then returns a detailed report straight to you.

Talos Intelligence

Talos Intelligence lets you know if ISPs see your sender reputation as Good, Neutral, or Poor:

• Good means that there’s no threat activity from your IP address or domain
• Neutral means that your reputation needs some improvements
• Poor indicates that your email probably won’t make it to the recipients’ inbox

This email testing tool also shows you if your domain & IP are part of any blacklists.

Pricing plan: Free

9. Mail Tester

This easy-to-use is great for checking your email for spam-related red flags. Mail Tester will examine your emails for SPF and DKIM records (basic anti-spam and anti-fraud protocols), and keywords that might indicate spam to algorithms, as well as other metrics.

Mail Tester will also see whether or not you’re blacklisted by major email clients. All you need to get started is to send an email to the tester link. If you occasionally perform manual tests, you can actually access its web interface for free, without even creating an account.

Pricing plan: Free

10. Postmark

If you really don’t want to send your email to a tester link, you can try Postmark.

With this email testing tool, you simply copy and paste your email code into its easy-to-use interface. This feature makes it easy to check different variations of your email for spam scores. Postmark is a straightforward tool to get that score and improve your email.

Pricing plan: Free

5 Email Testing Tools to assess subject lines

Crafting catchy subject lines is often a challenge. Fortunately, you don’t need to wait until your email goes out to see whether your subject line is compelling enough or not.

The following email testing tools can help you evaluate and improve your subject line before even a single subscriber sees your email.

11. Send Check It

Send Check It is a simple yet comprehensive tool that looks for scannability, reading grade level, and word and character count. It also assesses your subject line’s sentiment and looks for spammy words and other weak points, such as a fake RE: or FWD: at the beginning of your subject, all-cap words, or excessive punctuation.

This is an amazing tool if you are unsure why your subject lines aren’t doing so great and need some insights into where you might be going wrong.

Pricing plan: Free

12. Subject Line

This is another tool to help you evaluate the effectiveness of your subject line. You just need to copy and paste your subject line, and Subject Line will give you a score for it from 0 to 100 points. It will also explain where and why you have lost some points and provide recommendations on making your subject line better.

This tool is a great way to check your subject line both for spam makers and for suggestions to boost your open rate. It makes these determinations by looking at data collected from its various partners, so the benefit here is that you’ll get real-time, useful information on which to make some of your email subject line-based decisions.

Sometimes the information you receive can be a little shallow, but it is still a nice tool for evaluating your subject lines in a general sense.

Pricing plan: Free

13. CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer

Generally believed to be the single best headline testing tool out there, CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer is a great and handy resource to have in your back pocket.

In fact, a blog headline and a subject line are a bit different, but they both incorporate many of the same features. That is why this tool becomes a great way to test your subject lines for grammar, structure, and length, among other things. Try it yourself and see how well it works for you.

Pricing plan: Free

14. Mizy

Mizy’s claim is that it looks at subject lines differently. The tool uses AI (Artificial Intelligence) and deep learning to help you find the perfect email subject line. Moreover, Mizy accesses a database of emails and knows their open and CTRs (click-through rates).

This is made possible with its deep learning neural network. It can collect data and restructure itself to provide more helpful insights on what’s working and what isn’t. Once you have entered your subject line, Mizy will generate a performance rating (out of 100) and share tips on how to improve your copy.

Pricing plan: Free

15. Zurb TestSubject

Many people don’t know this, but email subject lines on mobile devices are often truncated. The result? Subject lines appear to be lengthy and almost painful to read. Zurb TestSubject realized this and took action.

How your information looks will change from device to device and email client to client. Gmail on a Samsung Galaxy might look a bit different than Safari on an iPhone X, and you want to make sure your subject line looks good on all these devices.

Zurb TestSubject’s product design team ensures that your email subject lines on mobile can get the attention they need to generate results.

Pricing plan: Free

For more on how to write a compelling email subject lines, we’ve got some great blog posts on the AVADA Commerce blog that can help you out:

• The Ultimate Guide for Email Subject Line Testing
• 101 Killing Email Headlines Examples
• How to Write Best Subject Lines for Open Rates?
• 33 Holiday Email Subject Lines and Most Favored Emojis

5 Email Testing Tools to check inbox preview and HTML formatting

When creating your emails, you can always check how it displays either right in the email service provider (ESP) or by sending test emails to different email clients. It sounds like a legit first step. Nevertheless, you can never be too careful.

So, why not use specialized tools to validate your email’s code and double-check how it renders in various environments and email clients? Just look at some of them.

16. EmailPreviewServices

EmailPreviewServices provides you with real-time real-device screenshots of how your emails render in popular desktop, web-based, and mobile email applications.

To start using, copy and paste your email content, upload an already-saved HTML file, or forward the email you want to check to a dedicated email address. The process takes some time, but in the end, you’ll get screenshots of how your email displays on the devices you have chosen.

Pricing plans (paid monthly):

• Standard Plan: $25/ month
• Business Plan: $45/ month
• Professional Plan: $160/ month
• Enterprise Plan: $399/ month

17. Mailtrap

Mailtrap provides a wide variety of email tests you can perform on your emails, including preview testing. With this tool, you can check your HTML to make sure that it works properly with various email clients.

Mailtrap is a really safe testing environment that captures your test emails. This way, they never end up in your subscribers’ inboxes, and you are able to analyze them carefully. The tool allows you to preview each message and look at the code behind it. It’ll check each line of the code and inform you what exactly can cause problems and which email clients are likely to be affected.

The tool also checks the spam score of each email as well as your presence on various blacklists. Additionally, it offers a number of other features, such as manual and auto-forwarding of emails, dedicated inboxes, seamless integrations with various frameworks and libraries, and many more.

Pricing plans (paid monthly):

• Free Plan
• Individual Plan: $9.99/ month
• Team Plan: $24.99/ month
• Business Plan: $49.99/ month
• Premium Plan: $99.99/ month
• Enterprise Plan: $299.99/ month

18. Email on Acid

Email on Acid has earned a robust reputation in email testing communities as it’s expanded its scope and capabilities.

The tool works like a checklist that takes you through the entire process, verifying your campaigns thoroughly, and even analyzing them after they’ve been sent. Recently, the tool offers preview testing on 70 different clients on devices. It offers various tools for testing copy, improving deliverability, and getting past spam filters.

Email on Acid also puts a considerable emphasis on collaboration, so if you are working on your newsletter as part of a team, this might be a decent option for your small business or group.

Pricing plans (paid monthly):

• The Basics Plan: $86/ month
• Premium Plan: $132/ month
• Professional Plan: $499/ month
• Enterprise Plan: custom pricing

19. Litmus

Litmus is a common tool not only for previewing HTML emails but also for creating and editing them.

You can take advantage of its available templates or upload your own code and polish it with the built-in editor. As you tweak it, the tool offers a real-time preview for more than 90 devices and clients.

Litmus also offers different tools for quickly formatting errors, validating links, and improving the spam scores of your messages. You can then send test emails directly into Litmus and have the platform analyze them for you.

Pricing plans (paid monthly):

• Litmus Basic: $99/ month
• Litmus Plus: $199/ month
• Litmus Enterprise: custom pricing

20. Testi@

Don’t be deceived by Testi@’s simplistic design or the limited set of features. This is an excellent budget option for those particularly interested in the HTML preview email.

The platform lets you upload your emails and see how they will render in over 80 clients. You can also make use of handy spam testing tools built into the tool. Chrome plugin is available.

Pricing plans:

• Free Plan
• Pro Testing Plan: $16 for 31 days

21. HTML Email Check

This is mainly a markup validation tool. HTML Email Check analyzes the HTML, XHTML, and CSS behind your emails and suggests what can cause problems. The tool also checks links, fonts, messages, as well as spots potential accessibility issues (i.e., missing alt tags). You can send yourself a test email in order to check if everything renders as expected.

While the tool doesn’t offer an email preview per se, it is excellent when combined with other tools from this list. You can use it in conjunction with your ESP and validate all templates before they’re delivered to your users.

Pricing plans:

• Pro Monthly: $14.95/ month
• Pro Quarterly: $39.95/ 3 months
• Pro Annually: $149.95/ 12 months

The bottom line

Testing your emails before delivering them is essential to ensure that your subscribers will get the best possible email experience. The more testing you implement, the more confidence you get that your email newsletters are helping your small business or community group grow in the right ways.

There are many fantastic email testing tools out there, and we’ve tried to cover the best ones to get you started. So, do you have any favorites that we’ve missed? Don’t hesitate to share your email testing tools with us! We’re always happy to hear from you!