Campaigns are an indispensable tool to advertise your products to a wide range of audience by reaching them out on a variety of platforms and devices. Once you have assembled your leads, prepared your contact list, configured the automation workflows, finalized your campaign's design, determined your campaign's timings, there is yet one essential step left to perform in order to ensure your campaign's ultimate success. This final step is none other than testing your campaign.

Testing campaigns prior to dispatching them to the end customer is vital for the overall performance and effectiveness of your marketing endeavors, since it enables you to identify all possible red flags or errors within your campaigns and thereby presents you with the opportunity to resolve them at the earliest. Nowadays, customers are quick to form an opinion about a brand simply by looking at the design of its emails or by reading the very first line of text within an SMS sent by the company. All it takes is a few poorly designed emails with unappealing and distorted images or an SMS rife with grammatical errors to tarnish a brand's reputation. 

On the other hand, a flawless and an aesthetically designed campaign can not only help a brand appear authentic and professional but can also enhance the conversion rate through instant responses from customers. Well thought out and properly designed campaigns are not just crucial for increasing sales but are also pivotal for the purpose of customer engagement and retention. 

In other words, testing is imperative because it helps you to ensure that your campaign is devoid of any typing errors, that it looks the way you intended it to, that it appears consistent within different web browsers and also across different devices such as desktops, tablets and smartphones. In the case of email campaigns, since emails are rendered differently in each email client such as MS Outlook, Gmail, macOS Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird etc., testing is essential from a visual standpoint. Simply put, testing campaigns cannot be overlooked since it helps reduce churn, enhance website traffic, boost conversions and build customer loyalty.

NotifyVisitors offers you the ability to test your campaigns on a specific section of clients known as the Test Segment before you deploy them to your entire customer base.

Mark test customers in NotifyVisitors

Follow the step by step process delineated below in order to mark any user as a test customer.

1. Navigate to NotifyVisitors Dashboard > Segments > User List.

2. Filter customers according to the required criteria (Date, User ID, NV UID, Email, Phone, Name, Active & New Users).
3. Select any one customer from the list by clicking on the customer’s name mentioned under the ‘Name’ column.
4. Upon doing so, a new frame would appear on-screen wherein you can mark this specific customer as a test customer via the checkbox titled ‘Set as a Test User’.

5. Repeat the above mentioned steps for all those customers to whom you intend to send test campaigns. NotifyVisitors would automatically create a ‘Test Segment’ and include all of your selected customers within this newly created segment.

How to send test campaigns in NotifyVisitors

Once you have successfully marked the test customers, NotifyVisitors makes it effortless for you to send your test campaigns to all the customers within the segment by allowing you to do so by means of a few clicks. Follow the step by step process delineated below in order to send test campaigns:

1. Navigate to NotifyVisitors Dashboard > Campaigns > Campaign > Create Campaign.

2. Under the ‘Reach Users Via’ section click on the Email category.
3. A new frame would appear on-screen wherein you can configure your email in five steps viz. Recipients, Content, Review, Send or Schedule, Resend Setup.

4. Enter the required details & configure the settings within the ‘Recipients’ section and then click on the button titled ‘Continue To Content’.
5. Do the same within the ‘Content’ section and then click on the button titled ‘Continue To Review’. This would take you to the ‘Review’ section, wherein as the name suggests, you can review the details and the configurations set in the preceding two sections.
6. Within the ‘Review’ section, adjacent to the heading titled ‘Original Email Campaign’, there exists a button titled ‘Test Email’ (highlighted in light blue color). Click on this button.

7. Upon doing so, a pop-up titled ‘Recipient Email’ would appear on-screen. Within this pop-up, under the heading ‘Test Email’, there is a checkbox titled ‘Send to all Test Users’. Click on this checkbox, in order to tick mark it, and then click on the button titled ‘Send Email’ within the same pop-up.

8. Once you click on the ‘Send Email’ button, your current email campaign will instantly get sent to all the customers included within the Test Segment.

   Nevertheless, if you wish to send your test email campaign to a specific email address irrespective of whether or not it is included within the Test Segment, then simply do not tick mark the checkbox titled ‘Send to all Test Users’ and enter a valid email address in the input box present under the heading titled 'Enter Email’.

   Once you have entered the desired email address in the input box, click on the ‘Send Email’ button. Note that in this case, in order to successfully deploy your email campaign you need to first set up a valid service provider. 

You can send test campaigns to customers included within the Test Segment using other channels like SMS, iOS Push, Android Push and Web Push by following the same process as described above.

This is how you can seamlessly test your campaigns using test segments and thereby ensure that they function correctly and appear exactly as you intended to the end customer.