You can check your email designs by sending a test copy of your message to yourself and/or colleagues on your test list. Sending a test email is an easy way to check and ensure that your content has a consistent appearance across multiple email clients, as well as get stakeholder approval for your email messages before they send out.

Essentials to Get Started

• Your Test List has at least one email address (see Create and Segment Test Lists)
• Your email is ready to send
  • Navigate to Review > Validate Message in your Email Composer to make sure that your email passes all of the validation checkpoints 

Instructions

1. In the upper right corner of the Email Composer, click Test
2. Select the Version to Send: HTML or Text
3. If you want, update the Subject Line Prefix, then click Save New Prefix.
   
   • This will appear in front of the subject line of your test email. This helps you identify test emails from live messages in your inbox.
   • The default prefix is "TEST- "
4. Select Test Recipients from the available options:
   • Yourself (logged in user)
   • Select Test Message Recipients... to select multiple contacts from your test list
   • Your entire Test List, or any of its segments
5. In the browser pop-up, click OK to send the test message

Test messages will appear in the recipient's inbox within a minute or two.

When sending out a test message, consider opening it up in different browsers and different mail clients, such as Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, or AOL, so you can see how your images and text are being rendered and interpreted. Each mail client and browser will interpret your HTML code differently, and you'll want to see what the end result will be.

If you are having trouble receiving a test message, see: Fixing Test Emails That Were Not Delivered