Creating a Test Campaign to Aid Email Template Creation

Owned by Perry Tew
Last updated: Aug 10, 2020 by Jonathan Tew
3 min read

Ultracart Tutorial

Autoresponder: Create a test campaign to make email templates easier to design

 

Date

3/14/2011

Revision

1.0


Change Log:

  1. – Initial Revision




Introduction
When creating an Autoresponder email template that contains custom velocity code, it is useful to test that logic against a customer. This tutorial provides a walkthough on creating a test campaign with a test recipient.
The UltraCart Autoresponder documentation may be found here: Email Autoresponder.


A link to this documentation is located on the main Autoresponder Page:

Menu → Marketing → Autoresponder


Notations

 

Steps

  1. Configure your mail server. See the AR docs above for instructions on this. This is (most likely) a one time setup to create an email connection for all your future campaigns.
  2. From the AR Home, create a new campaign.

  1. On General Settings, enter the following:
    1. Name: Test Campaign
    2. Public Name: Test Campaign
    3. Public Description: Test Campaign
    4. Suspended: Checked


  1. Click Save Changes
  2. After the page reloads, go back to AR Home (use breadcrumbs at top or 'Return to Campaign List' link located above the Campaign Steps.
  3. Within the Administration section, click on the 'Manual Enrollment' link.
  4. Select the Test Campaign and click 'Continue' to … continue.


  1. Enter an email address and display name. Just leave the first step as 'Start'. Since you'll never fire the campaign, it doesn't matter


The email address should be a customer who has purchased from you before. If you have yourself set up as your own customer, i.e. you've tested your system out with a few purchases, use that. Also, since there's a lot of power in the email templates around order history, you may wish to repeat these steps a few times adding customers who have a lot of purchases, and/or perhaps even those who haven't made a purchase in a while. This can help test logic branches like the one show below.

  1. Click Enroll when you've filled in the fields.
  2. Either repeat the process to add more recipients (email addresses) or return to the Campaign List.


That's it! You're done. You may now use this information to test out your email templates when using custom logic. Compare the before and after sections below to see the difference!

Before


With no test email configured:

And using velocity code that sends one of two coupons (5% off and 10% off) based on whether the customer has ordered in the last month:
<html>
<body>
#if($customer.hasPurchasedInLastDays(30))
Here's a coupon for 5% off your next purchase!<br />
This coupon is expires in 24 hours!<br />
Please use coupon code: $coupon.generateCode('5_OFF', '24')<br />
#else
Here's a coupon for 10% off your next purchase!<br />
This coupon is expires in 3 days!<br />
Please use coupon code: $coupon.generateCode('10_OFF', '72')<br />
#end


|OPT_OUT|
</body>
</html>


I receive the following message when I validate & preview my email.

AFTER


When I select a test email (field does auto lookup – just type a few letters):


And I receive no rendering issues:



And my html output is the following:


A few things to note:

  1. The html is ugly. Better add some style!
  2. The if-statement chose the second branch because my test email had not purchased within the last 30 days.
  3. My coupon code says 'Error – Non-existent code'! Just a warning here to test! In this example, I've purposely used a non-existent coupon code. Test your emails! To fix this specific example, I'd need to go into the coupon manager and create the coupon codes 5_OFF and 10_OFF.


Thanks,
UltraCart Support.