How to run tests in Webmecanik Automation ?

To set up a campaign or emails in Webmecanik Automation can be sometimes a little tricky with big campaigns or multiple types of targets.

To maximize your campaign efficiency and save time, ruling some simple tests is the way to go.

Enhance your actions with those simple tests :

Create one test contact or more :

To properly test  your campaigns or emailing, the first step is to create a test contact. You must have access to the inbox of the contact to check the test emails. (You can add a phone number to test SMSs)

Proceed like a manual add contact, note that you only need to enter the email for a test contact (or other custom field set as mandatory or use in the test email).

To manually add a contact, check out this article ; 

https://support.webmecanik.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001406079-How-to-manually-create-contacts- 

To test campaigns you will need more than one contact to check all the scenarii and the different branches of a campaign. 

The best solution is to use emails alias.

Use emails alias to create multiple test contacts 

Alias of emails are variant of the same email that allows you to have multiple email addresses that will all land in the same inbox.

Basically, an alias looks like this : 

firstnamelastname@mycompany.com is the base address 

You need to add + and a number to create an alias, like this : 

firstnamelastname+1@mycompany.com 

firstnamelastname+2@mycompany.com

firstnamelastname+3@mycompany.com 

etc…

All emails sent to these addresses will land in firstnamelastname@mycompany.com inbox.

This allowed you to create multiple contacts to test several scenarii with all emails regroup in one place. It’s a huge time saving practice.

Create a test segment 

It’s a necessary step to run tests. As for the contact, create a segment manually.

Create a simple static segment with no filters and validate it.

Add contacts to test segment 

Manually add your contacts to the test segment. To do that, go in the contact sheet and in the preference menu.

Clone emails and campaigns to send tests.

The fastest way to run emails test is to use the “send an example” feature. But this fast option has many flaws that don’t make it the best test solution. For example you can’t use tokens or dynamic contents in this test.

To achieve the best and closest from reality test possible, you can clone an email to send to your test segment. The pros of this solution is that you can test tokens and dynamic content (especially with alias emails). 

After cloning it, select “New Segment Email”, rename your email (with a specific name so you can delete it easily once the test is done) and select you test segment.

Send the email to the segment, wait for the crons to run (10 minutes) and check the email directly in your inbox.

Create test campaigns

Campaigns are one of the core functionalities that you have to test in Webmecanik Automation. They are the heart of your marketing strategy, so to be sure that they work perfectly is important. 

To build test campaign you have multiple choices : 

• Start a campaign from scratch to test a specific scenario or functionality.
• Clone an existing campaign to launch it in test conditions.

To set up a working test campaign you will need : 

• One or more test contacts according to the scenarii
• One or more test segment
• Emails or SMS created for test purpose.

Here is a tutorial on how to quickly set up a test campaign :

Here's an interactive tutorial for the visual learners

https://www.iorad.com/player/1573919/Support-Automation-Webmecanik---Créer-une-campagne-de-test 

Important Notice : When you send email tests, you have to open all links in incognito mode in your browser. That’s because the cookies recorded in a classic session can distort the results or display error pages.

For the campaigns, tests can be longer depending on the campaign size and the date chosen.

Another solution is to create a smaller test campaign to check one element like a campaign email, for example.

IMPORTANT : If possible NEVER MODIFY an already launched campaign. This can result  unpleasant important changes. 

Advice : Delete your test emails and test campaigns once testing phase is over to avoid confusion with production campaigns.