Testing your designs before sending them out within your campaigns is key. This article outlines several ways you can go about testing your designs within the platform to ensure your rendering is optimum.
Using rendering simulation
Preview within Message Builder
Preview with Email on Acid
Sending a test message
Using rendering simulation
With the rendering simulation tool, you can test conditional blocks using data from contacts in your database to test a range of inputs. Once your design has been saved, go to HTML preview.
From here you can easily go to the "Rendering simulation" tool or change the canvas size by click on the button "Responsive".
Marketing email simulation
This option enables you to render any contact data linked to an email address. You can type the email of a contact, then click "check". You can also test field values directly by selecting a field from the drop-down list and typing in a value. The message is rendered when you click "check".
Transactional email simulation
If you want to test that your sales data are displaying properly (for example for a post-purchase campaign), you can test the rendering of this type of data. You will have two options there:
- Testing sales data using a specific basket/order ID (which you can find in Data > sales data)
- Testing sales data using a recent from the drop-down menu
Preview within Message Builder
The preview of your design is available within Message Builder. Click on "Preview" where you can switch from desktop to mobile rendering visualization on the top right whilst building your design.
You can also send a test by clicking on the button "send a test".
Preview with Email on Acid
Splio offers an integration with the Email on Acid inbox preview tool, accessible from the design preview (this is an option that may not be enabled if you are not seeing the button as shown below). To view your current design in Email on Acid, open the "tools" menu and select "Email clients preview".
Email on Acid visualizes the rendering of your email in more than 70 different mobile, web mail, and desktop mail clients.
Generating the previews might take a few minutes. Please be patient while Email on Acid converts the emails for all web clients.
Sending a test message
If you are using the HTML editor, you can also send test messages by using the Test tab within the menu.
The personalization data will be taken from the contact information related to the test addresses. Make sure that contacts using these addresses are present in the database and have data attached to them.
While the email test method is fine to test simple personalization with variables, it is not recommended for testing conditional blocks. It will be more effective to use the rendering simulation tool for this purpose first, then follow with Email on Acid.