Overview

Sending test messages is a way to ensure your messages appear and function as intended before you send them out to live contacts. This can help you minimize mistakes, test out experiment variations, and highlight opportunities to improve message content.

We've made it easy to create Test Groups so you can send promotional and transactional test messages to specified members of your team. When creating new messages or editing existing ones, you can send them to Test Groups you've created or manually enter test recipients, giving you the space to create a quality assurance process that works best for you.

A contact needs to be in your account, but does not need to be subscribed, to receive test messages.

Create a Test Group

1. Navigate to Settings > Account Settings > Test Groups to create a new Test Group. 

2. Click New Test Group, give the group a name, and add contacts to it.

3. Your new Test Group will be available for test messages during message creation.

4. If you use Cordial's API for sending test messages, you can pass in the Test Group ID so you don't have to manually enter each individual email address or cID.

Send test messages

To help you keep track of different test sends, the subject line of each test message automatically includes the date and time of sending (in addition to your subject line).

1. Create a new batch message (Messages > Create New Message) or message automation (Automations > Create New Automation). You can also send tests of existing messages and automations. 

2. Once you've added your message content and configured the schedule and audience, click the Send Test button on the left.

3. In the Send Test Message window, click the dropdown to select your Test group (if desired). You can also manually add contacts by email or cID in the Contacts dropdown.

4. Select Add timestamp to subject line if you want to include the date for organizational purposes.

5. In the Custom message pane, add any additional information you want to send your Test Group, such as text validating that the message is a test.

The custom message will appear above the test message when opened.

6. Under Experiment variants, choose whether to Send random variants or Send specific subject line variants. If using the latter, choose the desired subject line variants from the dropdown.

Test sends of specific body experiments is not currently supported.

7. When ready, click the Send Test button.

Edit, copy, or delete Test Groups

To edit (add or remove users), copy, or delete a Test Group, hover over the dropdown arrow and select the desired action.