Dispatching a campaign is similar to parting with your child for the first day at school: you feel a bit daunted and rack your brains recalling if everything's duly prepared, but at some point you have to let go and wave goodbye because it's time for baby to face the world. 👼

Nevertheless, I have some great news for you: before you show "baby" the door, you can preview and test your campaign email; and once you're comfortable, you can schedule it to be sent later or immediately. 😃

➜ How can I test and preview my campaign email before sending and why should I do it?

➜ Why do campaigns look different in Outlook?

➜ Schedule your campaign to be sent out later or send now

There are two ways that you can assess the looks of your campaign before you dispatch it: sending yourself a test email or previewing in browser.

Testing a campaign in all manner of inboxes is a great idea to see how it would render in different webmail providers and mobile devices and make adjustments if necessary (for instance, to improve legibility). A test email is a truthful depiction of what happens on the applicants' end when they open the message.
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To send a test email:
​     1) Click Send me a test email
​     2) Insert a valid email address and click Send test email

You should promptly receive the test email, so make sure to check your email inbox as well as your SPAM and Junk folders.

Previewing in browser is closest to your actual work and homogeneous because HTML renders the same in all browsers. For that same reason, campaign recipients are also given a link to view the content of emails as it was intended through their browsers, as shown below:

Care that your campaigns look great in browser display to account for rendering differences across email clients, image blocking as a default setting, letting subscribers use the URL of the hosted web version to easily share the email – among many other benefits! 💌

To preview in browser:
​     1) Click Preview in browser
​     2) The preview will load in a new tab, so don't close it before viewing

Outlook uses Microsoft Word to render HTML emails, and this is problematic because MS Word is a text processor meant for print and not web design, i.e., it regards emails as documents. For example, if an email is longer than the length of a sheet of paper, unwanted page breaks will automatically be added to split content between "pages", thus breaking the original HTML formatting to cause spacing, image and font issues. In other words, Word's rendering engine doesn't obey the same standards as webpages, and that's one of the reasons why we provide the option to view emails in browser.

Please note that our email builder was made to be compatible with all email clients and in fact works great with browser display as well as Gmail, Yahoo, GMX, etc. Only Outlook is infamously faulty on a regular basis, for reasons outside our control. 🙁

The proper time to send a campaign is contingent upon the likeliness of it being opened, read/clicked and even responded to. So depending on when it's completed, you may want to delay its' delivery until the perfect moment or push it out at once. Factors such as different time zones, standard working hours, synchronising with outside circumstances, etc., could be relevant.

     1) Tap Send now
​     2) Press Are you sure? Click to send now

This will automatically move the campaign from Planned to Queued and then Dispatched*.

     1) Click Schedule
​     2) Tap Click here to pick a date and time, select a date on the calendar and press Done

This will immediately move the campaign from Planned to Scheduled and then Dispatched*. You can cancel any time before the due date by pressing Cancel schedule.

*Come here to learn more about the state tabs.

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PUBLISHED: November 12, 2018
​LAST UPDATED: August 12, 2020 at 2:32 p.m.