I’ve been testing and re-testing the VisiOlo free and paid account signup process and until I learned a little trick with Gmail, I found it frustrating. In our registration process (and with most registration processes) email is a key field which means we can’t allow duplicate emails in the system.
Because of this contstraint, I quickly found myself running out of email addresses while I was testing. I would have to log in to my admin panel, delete old test accounts, and then resume testing. Plus, I had to check multile email accounts to see the results of my tests.
Then, while listening to the Marketing Over Coffee podcast Christopher Penn came to my rescue (you’ll find the tip at 15:50 in the podcast). Chris was talking about using a Gmail address tag for seeding email lista, but my main interest was in using the feature he mentioned as a solution to my testing needs.
In Gmail, you can use the “+” sign and insert whatever tag you want between the + and the @ sign — Gmail will ignore everything between the + and the @ and will still consider the address valid, but you can use the tag in any way you want.
Here’s an example of how it works: say your address is me@gmail.com and you want to do multiple tests on a subscription form (like I did). Now you can just add a tag such as me+test1@gmail.com. Your form validation will consider this a new address, but Gmail will still deliver the email as normal.
This can also be used for ‘tagging’ your email address in lists (as Chris Penn suggested). Say you want to subscribe to a number of lists on a certain topic (like Hiking for instance) and have them automatically filtered with Gmail labels. Just use me+hiking@gmail.com to subscribe. Then you can set up a filter in Gmail that labels all messages that have “me+hiking” in the address with your “hiking” label.
There are lots of uses for this little Gmail hack, but for me, it’s a big help when it comes to testing.
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Absolutely fantastic! Now I know why they call you the Marketing Ace! I have a gmail account, but really don’t use it much. It just moved up to the main email for registering for all the stuff I get suckered into. Now I can group things together and delete things easily that prove worthless.
But not my “Marketing Ace” subscription.
Thanks a bunch.
Tim. You are gonna love Gmail. I have all of my POP accounts going into Gmail now. It’s a huge time savings and the search function alone is well worth making the full move to Gmail. Spam filtering is also great in Gmail. I rarely see true spam messages.
Glad you are hanging on to your Daily Marketing Ace subscription! We have had some downtime with the tips lately, but we’re back