Send a Test Email

Email Testing

Testing your emails—and following the pre-send quality control checklist—before sending are really important steps to make sure your emails show up correctly for your recipients!

How to send a test email:

1. Navigate to Email Studio within Marketing Cloud.

2. Click on Content in top navigation.
3. Locate and open the email.
4. Click the arrow next to Send to show a dropdown menu.
5. Click Preview and Test.

6. Click the people icon  on the left side. 
7. Click on the folder  near the subject and preheader.

8. Navigate to the sending data extension.
9. Click on a subscriber and click Select. Note: Selecting a subscriber here will not send them the email. This selection just pulls their information to let you preview how the email will appear, including personalization scripts or dynamic content.

10. Review the preview to see how the email will display for the subscriber.
11. If personalization scripts or dynamic content are used, click the forward or back arrows (or repeat steps 8-9) to toggle between different subscribers to see how content will appear for different attributes such as academic program or campus.

12. Click the email/test tube icon 
13. Type in up to 5 email addresses to receive the test email. Verify all email addresses, including your own, are written correctly.  
14. Select the Send Classification you’d like to use in the send, either Email Framework - Commercial or Email Framework - Transactional.
15. Create the Subject Prefix to indicate to email recipients that the message is only a test. This prefix appears before the subject line text (e.g., [Test]: A question for you).
16. Click Send Test.
17. Check your inbox for the test send. NOTE: Test sends usually deliver within a few minutes. Occasionally, test sends may take longer.

It's strongly encouraged to use the test send feature outlined above rather than sending your email as a real send. Full email sends can junk up the tracking area of your business unit, and it counts as a real send in our Marketing Cloud billing agreement.

Not getting your test emails?

Marketing Cloud can be a little slow in delivering test emails—10 minutes is not unheard of. But if you've waited more than half an hour and haven't received your test email, it's because of an issue.

If the subscriber you chose in Step 9 above is unsubscribed from receiving your emails, the test email will not go through. Choose another subscriber and send another test email.

Related to this, it's important to never click the unsubscribe link in a test email. If you do, the record you chose will get unsubscribed from your entire business unit. If you do click the unsubscribe link, and you're using the Email Framework, you can resubscribe. Click on unsubscribe link, and then on the page you land on, click resubscribe.

If you have records that are unsubscribed that you need to resubscribe, send the following info to datareq@iu.edu:

• Business unit you're working in
• Publication list you're using
• Email address and Salesforce ID for record(s) that need to be resubscribed