Testing your email templates is an important part of any campaign creation. In Bloomreach Engagement we offer several options on how to test your emails. We strongly recommend using at least one of the options before launching any live campaign.

Preview an email

The TEST section allows you to preview the email template for specific customers or generate email previews in specific environments.

Overview

In the Overview tab, you can see a rendered preview of your email for specific customers including their individual personalization. You are able to manually choose a specific customer using the arrow buttons or typing their email into the input field. You can also click on the filter icon (1) to drill down a specific segment of customers to see the preview for. This is especially useful if you use personalization in the email. The preview also allows you to switch between a desktop and a mobile view (2).

Email Previews

The Email Previews tab lets you generate previews of the created email template in a wide range of particular environments, such as the iOS Gmail client, to identify any visual discrepancies such as image fitting. The content of your template is placed within a screenshot from the particular environment to recreate how exactly it would appear there.

Upon navigating to the Test -> Email Previews tab, you can generate the previews and check your email on a wide palette of environments. After choosing a particular one, you can click on the preview and see the email template on a full scale, as shown in the picture below. Using the buttons at the bottom you can re-generate the Email Preview after making changes to the template, or switch between the views of all environments (1), as well as navigate between the environments immediately using the list on the right (2).

We strongly recommend sending a test email to your address or a list of addresses of your colleagues before launching the live campaign.

Rendering campaign preview with on event trigger data

If an on-event trigger is used in Settings for Email Campaign, the preview will automatically look for an event of the same type to render the campaign with past customer data. However, if the email campaign is a part of the Scenario, the user can pick which on-event trigger filter will be used by its action id and type. The platform will then look for the first event of the same type for the selected customer as configured in the on-event trigger. More specifically, it will find the first-ever sent email from the customer profile and render the preview. If it cannot find such an event for a selected customer, it will render it using any event of the same type it finds in the project.

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Campaign preview on overview tab only

Rendering campaign preview with on event trigger data works only for the 'overview tab', and not for 'send test email or preview link' or 'Email previews'.

Send test email or preview link

It is also possible to test your email campaign by sending a preview email to a specific set of email addresses (e.g. your colleagues), or by sharing a web preview link. You can do so after opening the modal by clicking on the "Send test email or preview link" on the top right.

You can send a test email to a specific email address to examine the appearance of the email from a customer's point of view. Emails can be sent to max. 20 addresses at once. Addresses can be inserted as a list of addresses separated by one of the common separators such as space, or one of the .,:;. The generated email uses the currently opened language version and A/B test variant, and the selected preview customer to populate personalization.

Another option is to generate a web preview link for the email. Such links can be shared with e.g colleagues without the need to access Bloomreach Engagement or send separate testing emails. The generated email uses the currently opened language version and A/B test variant, and the selected preview customer to populate personalization.

The preview-generated link is available for 91 days after creation. All generated links will be saved on your local storage so that upon coming back to the modal, the existing link is displayed if it is matching the language and variant version. Please note that generated links are not saved globally, so you will only see saved links that you have generated or just generate a fresh one.

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Tracking of events

Previewing or sending test emails does not generate any campaign events. Similarly if recommendations are used inside the email no recommendation serve event is tracked.

Other tactics

Apart from visually checking emails in our TEST tab, you can also use a few other tactics that our users commonly use.

Seed list

In the case of inbox placement testing, you can import desired addresses into Bloomreach Engagement as customers with a way to identify them and involve them in your usual campaigns by adding the identification into your campaigns or standard segmentations.

Testers segment

Similar to above, you can import the internal addresses of people who review/need to see an email before it gets sent out, as customers, and include them in your segmentations or scenarios.

Sending test email to multiple inboxes

Using our feature “Send test email”, found in any email node, you can only send to one specific inbox. A trick you can use is to create an “alias”/”group”/”role” address, such as [email protected]_ that gets forwarded into the inboxes of all relevant people. You only need to input that one address into the “Send test email” form.