Test Your SMS Campaign

We always recommend sending a test of each message in your SMS Campaign to ensure proper formatting before sending out to your full contact list. You will want to do so this after you've customized your messages.

1. On the Campaign Designer step of your SMS Campaign, you will have an option to test each message you have set up. To test your message click the Send Test button for the message you wish to test.
   
2. Enter the phone number(s) you wish to send a test to and click Send Test SMS. You can send test messages to 20 contacts at a time (comma separated). We recommend adding a couple colleagues or project stakeholders to test as well. Note that you will be able to send test messages outside of regulated hours with consent from the recipients.  
   
   You will still be able to send Test SMS outside of regulated hours, however, you should only send test messages with consent from the recipient.
   

It is important to note that the test send is designed to review the formatting of the messages only. There are several SMS campaign features that will not be tested in a test invite, including merge codes.

If you wish to test these features, we recommend following the below steps for creating an internal test campaign.

Once you're done testing and everything is good to go, it's the moment of truth! Click the Send Now button to send out your messages right away or, if you prefer to schedule it to go out at a specific date and time, click the Not Scheduled link to set this up. Note, these options are subject to SMS Compliance regulations.

Responses Collected via Test Invites

Any responses collected via test invite messages will be marked as Test data.

Test data will be included in your reports and exports by default so that you can easily check your reports and exports as part of your full survey testing plan. Test data can later be filtered out on the Filter tab of your reports and exports.

Contact Merge Codes in Test Invites

If you are using contact merge codes to dynamically populate your messages or survey with personalized information, these will not work in test messages, nor will they populate inside of the survey.

• In the messages, any merge codes present will populate with dummy data. Keep in mind that only the [contact("first name")] is supported in sms messages. This merge code will be replaced with John in test messages.
• In surveys, the merge codes will be blank.

If you wish to test the use of merge codes, we recommend following the below steps for creating an internal test campaign.

Unsubscribe Behavior in Test Messages

If the recipient of one of your SMS test messages unsubscribes, they will not receive further test messages until they resubscribe. Additionally, if that recipient is a contact in any SMS Campaigns in your account, they will be unsubscribed from those and will not receive live sends until they resubscribe.

Create an Internal Test Campaign

In order to test the use of contact merge codes in either your campaign message or in the survey itself, you will need to create a separate internal test campaign. This will allow you to test the full suite of sms campaign features.

1. To do so, create a copy of your campaign on the Share tab.
2. Be sure to go to the Advanced Settings tab of your new campaign to give your campaign a name that indicates that it is a test campaign.

Your copied campaign will copy all of your messages and settings but will not copy the contacts.

• Go to the Contacts step of your internal test campaign.
• To complete a full test of your sms campaign you'll want to add yourself and any other testers as contacts with data in all of the contact fields that you are using in the message and the survey. Click Add Contacts and select Manually Enter a Single Contact; this is the quickest way to add a contact for testing purposes. Populate all the contact fields you wish to test and click Add Contact when you are finished.
• We recommend adding a couple of colleagues or project stakeholders to the test as well.
• When you are finished adding your test contacts, head over to the Send Campaign step and click the Send Now button instead of the Test button to send a live campaign to test the full suite of email campaign features!

Please note, responses collected via this method will NOT be marked as Test. You will have a couple of options for dealing with these responses.

1. Before sending out your live campaign you can go to Results > Individual Responses to delete each test response.
2. In both reports and exports on the Filter tab, you can take advantage of the filter By Campaign option to filter out responses from your internal test campaign.