Here's a tip to help email designers visualize what different groups of people will see once a personalized email campaign is launched.

Problem: You've created an elegant email template with some Dialogue merge fields that will be replaced at launch time with targeted content (either based on CRM contact properties, segment rules, role, or whatever). But that nagging feeling persists in the back of your mind saying "I wonder what existing customers will see when they receive this personalized email? Will the call to action be relevant? What will our top client's Executives see?".

Solution: Create several mock user profiles, called personas, then launch a test campaign (the emails will be individually created and personalized but not actually sent) then review the email content rendered for each persona.

Here's a screenshot (below) of an email campaign whose template has already been defined. Several personas have already been created for Executive, Existing Customer, Technical Decision Maker, and so on.

Click on 'Launch Test Campaign' and the email service will immediately process the emails (and again.... will not actually send them).


Once the test rendering is complete, you'll receive an email. You can now click each Persona's View link (I've prefixed my personas with 'aa_' to ensure they always appear at the top) to see how the segmentation rules populated the merge fields for each individual user.



You can also drill down and view emails that would be sent to individual users. This enables an iterative process whereby an email template is updated, a test launch is executed, and the resulting content is reviewed and refined.

Once you're happy with the results, simply launch the actual campaign. The production launch will execute with exactly the same behavior as the test launch.