How to check an email countdown before you send it

The preview in your campaign builder is a browser drawing a picture. Your reader is not using a browser. They are using Gmail on a phone, or a version of Outlook that renders email with a word processor, and neither of those behaves like the panel you are looking at.

That gap is where broken countdowns come from. Not from the timer being wrong, which is rare, but from it being right in a place nobody will ever see it. Four checks close almost all of that gap, none of them takes longer than a few minutes, and none of them costs anything.

We make Ampulla, so we sell one of the things this article is about. That is also why the checks below are the ones we actually run, including the two that most often find something wrong with our own work.

Send it to yourself, in the app your readers use

Every campaign tool has a test send, and almost nobody uses it more than once. Send the real email to real accounts in the two or three clients your list actually contains, and open them on the device people will hold rather than on the desktop you built it on.

Free accounts cost nothing and take a morning to set up once. A Gmail address, a Microsoft one, and an iPhone if there is one in the building will cover most lists. That is a better use of a morning than any rendering service, at least until you send often enough to need one.

The client worth caring about most is the one that behaves least like a browser. Animated images do not play at all in Outlook on Windows for the 2007 to 2019 versions, which Litmus reports as well, and the Office 365 version plays the animation three times before stopping.

A properly built timer still shows the correct remaining time in all of those, because the first frame is drawn when the message is opened. What breaks is the copy around it. Any sentence that describes movement is a sentence a large minority of your readers will find untrue.

Look at it with the images switched off

A meaningful share of readers have images blocked, by their client, their employer or their own choice. Turn images off in one of your test accounts and read the email as it arrives. This is the single fastest way to find a campaign that says nothing without its pictures.

The countdown will be a blank space or a piece of alternative text, which is fine and expected. What matters is whether the deadline is still in the message. If the only place the date appears is inside the picture, then for those readers you have sent an email with no offer in it.

The fix is not a better image. It is a sentence next to the timer that carries the same information in words, which also happens to be the thing that survives every other failure on this page.

Look at it after the deadline

Set a design's deadline to a moment in the past, send yourself the email, and open it. Almost nobody does this. It is the state every campaign ends in, and stays in for as long as the message sits in somebody's inbox.

What you are checking is that the expired version says something sensible. A timer that has run out should hold at zero rather than roll back and start counting down again, which is what an animation set to loop will do. A reader opening your message a day late would then be shown a fresh deadline that is not real.

Then read the words around it with the same eye. “Ends at midnight” is a sentence that ages badly, and the email will be read after midnight by somebody. Deciding now what the late arrival should see is cheaper than discovering it from a reply.

Open it twice, hours apart

Open the test email, leave it, and open it again several hours later. If the timer shows the same remaining time both times, something between you and the picture is holding a copy.

That is normal and worth understanding rather than fighting. Mail providers fetch and cache images for their own reasons, and Apple fetches them when the message arrives rather than when it is read. The mechanics of that, and what each of the big three does, are worth reading once before you plan a campaign around per recipient deadlines.

The practical consequence is small but firm. Treat the timer as something that makes a deadline feel real, never as a clock somebody can set a watch by. If a campaign depends on the second, the countdown is the wrong tool for it and the deadline in the text is the right one. The wider guide to countdowns in email covers where that line sits.

A checklist before you schedule

• Send a real test to real accounts in the clients your list actually uses, on the device they will use.
• Read it once with images switched off, and check the deadline is still somewhere in the words.
• Set a deadline in the past and look at the expired version before a customer does.
• Open the same test twice, hours apart, and expect a cached picture rather than a bug.
• Check any copy that describes movement, because a still first frame is what a large minority will see.

None of this is difficult and none of it needs a tool you do not have. It is mostly a matter of deciding, once, that the email you are testing is the one that arrives rather than the one on your screen. Everything else on this page follows from that.