Marketing Tools – Broadcast – Testing, Sending and Reporting

About Testing

When you reach the testing stage, you will see two sections: the testing screen, which contains the list of emails in your campaign, and the recipients screen, where you select your test recipients.

When testing:

• Subject lines of test emails will have [TEST] prepended to them

• Testing one-click unsubscribes will unsubscribe the test recipient. Remember to change their opt-in back to Y after testing.

• Consider using a third-party email auditing tool, such as Email Audit, Email on Acid, Litmus, 250ok, Mail Tester

Testing Screen

You will see the name of your message(s) in a grey box containing 4 symbols. Selecting the box will reveal a drop-down containing basic information on the message. It will also contain a thumbnail of the email, although be aware this does not always update in real time.

Preview: Displays the email in your browser with a shareable URL

Edit: Takes you back into the email or SMS builder.

Send Test: Opens a pop-up menu for you to add a test email address. (The email record needs a valid phone number for SMS tests)

Delete: Allows you to delete the message after confirming via an additional confirmation pop-up screen.

Additional notifications may appear alongside the message name when using the relevant functions:

• Conditional Content

• Split Testing

When using these functions in your email, toggles allowing you to easily test all variants become available:

Test Recipients

Here you can add email addresses for testing.

Once added and ready for testing, the email will be displayed in blue

To send the test, press the Send Test Messages button.

To add a test recipient:

• Add a new email into the ‘add email address’ box and select Add

• Select the Send Test button, then enter the email address in the pop-up menu to add a test email address and select Send.

• + Use the blue plus symbol to add a previous test recipient to the

• You can also include a Seed List, which is a preset list of email addresses. 

Troubleshooting Testing:

• Issues with your email appear on the testing and sending screens in a red warning box, stating that it's not ready to send and listing the errors encountered.

• If you do not receive your email, ensure your domain is authenticated.

• Or test sending it to a non-work email domain to ensure your work IT team isn’t blocking the emails.

Ready to send: You can proceed to scheduling or sending immediately.

Error Messages: If it is not ready to send, you will see a "Not ready to send" error with an explanation of why the broadcast is not ready.

1. Send Immediately: Select this to send the email straight away

2. Schedule Broadcast: You can schedule the message broadcast for a later date/time. Select the appropriate Date, Time, and Time Zone.

1. To reschedule or cancel, go to the Messaging Broadcast and select the clock icon.

2. You will then be presented with three options:

   1. Cancel existing schedule

   2. Send the broadcast immediately

   3. Reschedule broadcast

When scheduling your emails for before or after the switch to or from daylight saving time (DST) or British Summer Time (BST), the system will adjust your campaign by +/- 1 hour. Meaning, if you schedule a campaign for 10:00 before the time change, it will send the email +1 or -1 hour, depending on the seasonal time change.

Time changes are acknowledged at several points during the scheduling process, so it’s important to double-check your scheduling around these times.

Example 1: Scheduled at 9:16 AM GMT, confirmation shows as 10:16 AM BST

Split Test %: Allows you to select the percentage of the audience who will receive the test emails.

For example, if the campaign has two messages and you choose 10% of the audience, 5% will receive one email and 5% will receive the other email. The remaining 90% of the audience will be sent the winning email.

Split test winner: You will be presented with two options here,

• The winner will be chosen; the option requires a winner to be manually selected by a User.

  • After reviewing the reporting, you can then choose the split test version, click Select winner and send, and the remaining percentage of supporters not included in the test will receive the selected version.

• Automatically selecting a winner allows the User to choose the criteria that will determine the winner and the number of hours before a winner is selected.

  • This setting can be impacted by the split test account setting.

The reporting screen is split into several areas with different statistics:

Conversions:

• Engagement Count: The number of Data Captures, Sign Up, Survey, and eCards pages completed from the broadcast

• Single Donations: The number of one-time donations made from donation pages linked in the broadcast

• Recurring Donations: The number of recurring donations made from donation pages linked in the broadcast

• Total Donations: The total number of donations (one-time and recurring) made from donation pages linked in the broadcast

SMS Reporting:
Whilst similar to email reporting, it is not possible to track open rates through SMS; therefore, we are unable to provide the ADJ CTR, which is the percentage of clicks out of the supporters who opened the email Clicks ÷ Opens
Also, in the message report, clicks are listed before sent and delivered.

Message list and reporting

This contains a list of any messages within the broadcast. You may only have one, but if you have used conditional content or split tests then multiple messages will be seen.

Export as CSV
This function provides a comprehensive breakdown by email and includes detailed reporting on each link.

Sent

The number of supporters sent the message

Opens

The number of supporters who opened the email (unique)

Open rate

The percentage of opens Opens ÷ Sent

Clicks

The number of supporters who have clicked a link in your email or SMS (unique)

Click Rate

The percentage of clicks Clicks ÷ Sent

ADJ CTR

The percentage of clicks out of the supporters who opened the email Clicks ÷ Opens

SMS Sent

Number of sent SMS messages

SMS Delivered

Number of delivered SMS messages

SMS Failed

Number of failed SMS messages

Unsub

The number of supporters who clicked the unsubscribe link (unique)

Unsub Rate

The percentage of unsubscribes Unsub ÷ Sent

Bounce

The number of hard bounces

Bounce Rate

The percentage of bounces Bounce ÷ Sent

Spam

The number of supporters who marked the email as spam (unique)

Donations

The number of donations made from the message

Advocacy count

The number of advocacy actions made from the message. Advocacy page types include Click to Call, Email to Target, Petition, and X Post to Target.

Engagement count

The number of engagement actions made from the message. Engagement page types include Data Capture, Ecard, Email Signup, and Survey.

Performance

This shows a line graph of opens over time. You can switch to By Hour or By Day

It also shows a pie chart of the number of different activity types – opens, clicks, conversions, bounces, complaints. You can hover over the subject to view it:

Links

This will show the link name (as it was named by a User when building the email), the URL, and the number of clicks on the link. Unnamed links will be given a random reference code.

If you are using conditional content or split testing, it may be beneficial to name the links according to the email version they’re associated with or to use the export as CSV function to view individual clicks per email.