Journey Testing

There are several ways in which you can test your campaign journey before and after you launch your campaign.

• Preview user specific content
• Test send message
• Use the Test Mode
• Test with a sample event

Preview user specific content

You can preview user specific content on the journey builder by specifying the user email or the Customer ID. With this option, you can preview the templates in the journey for the particular user.

Note: Templates using recommendations will show content based on the default Blueshift user: testuser@getblueshift.com

Test send message

You can test send a particular message from the trigger to check how the message renders for a particular customer. Test sends from the journey builder access all campaign and adapter level configurations. If you are using dynamic parameters to track your links, you can test how these link tracking parameters render in the email. 

You can test send messages for email, SMS, push, and in-app channels.

To test send a message, complete the following steps:

1. Click ... to expand the options for the trigger you are testing.
2. Click Test Send.
3. Add the email address of the recipient who will receive the test message.
   Note: For emails, if you have configured any BCC recipients in the trigger settings, they will also receive this test message.
4. If you have configured A/B testing for the trigger, you can select a variant to test.
5. Click Send.

   The test message is sent for the Preview user that you select for the campaign.

Run campaign in Test Mode

You can run a campaign in test mode to test the campaign’s configurations and messages before launching it.

• Use this feature for testing purposes only, ideally with a curated short list of test users.
• Do not use the Test mode to complete a dry run for the entire campaign journey for the entire eligible user population.
• A campaign in test mode must always have an end time set, which should be no longer than 1 month to prevent such campaigns from running forever.

Some possible use cases for this feature are:

• Debugging a specific message rendering issue across many users.
• QA-ing sends across many users before making a campaign live.
• Testing external fetch rate limiting against your own systems before making a campaign live.

Campaign Behavior in Test mode

• When you launch a campaign in test mode, it does not send a message to the end user. Instead, it logs the message in your Blueshift S3 bucket folder campaigns/debug/<campaign_uuid> with the following file name: <channel>_<user’s email or user UUID>_<trigger_uuid>.html.
• You can review the messages in the S3 folder to understand which user qualified for which message (and which trigger). At this time, there is no way to visualize the test user’s flow through the campaign journey
• It does not apply messaging limits.
• Since it does not send a message, it also does not add to the user’s messaging counts.
• Links in the message body get rewritten so that they do not generate click stats.
• No stats of any kind get created.

Event or API triggered campaigns have the following additional characteristics:

• It ignores the campaign journey concurrency setting.
• Any live users that get processed while the campaign is in test mode will exit the campaign. This ensures no messaging occurs while the campaign is in test mode, even if the live user had received a message from a previous trigger when the campaign was live.
• Any test users that get processed while the campaign is live will exit the campaign. This ensures test users don't receive any subsequent messages if the campaign gets switched from test mode to live.

Select the Run in test mode option on the Campaign properties tab to test the campaign on real users without actually sending any messages.

Test campaign with sample event

For an event triggered campaign that is launched, you can test the event-triggered flows by publishing a test event from the Journey tab. This capability makes it easy to experience and validate a journey right from the Journey tab.

1. To publish the test event, click the Test campaign with sample event icon.

   
   

   The Publish a sample event window opens. The sample event has some pre-populated values from the most recent event received.

   

2. In the Publish a sample event window, provide the user information.
3. You can add additional parameters to the event data.
4. Click Publish.

A sample event is generated and it triggers the event flow for the specified user.