Lesson
Test Before You Send
Before sending an email to your users, test it to ensure it renders correctly. Braze provides tools to preview your layout across various platforms and verify that personalization is functioning as intended. Additionally, you can send test emails to your own inbox to verify links and interactive elements.
Preview Your Email
After you’ve finished composing your email, you can get a basic preview of how it will render on desktop, mobile, and plaintext.
In desktop and mobile mode, you can also check how your email will render in dark mode, which is becoming more common.
In the following video, learn how to preview an email and its personalization:
Logos and other elements may not render well in dark mode, so you should always check to make sure things are rendering as expected.
Inbox Vision for Cross-Platform Preview
You can test how your emails render across multiple platforms using the Inbox Vision tool. Inbox Vision sends your email to real inboxes and email client applications managed by Braze, then shows you how your email looks across a variety of devices, operating systems and email clients.
You can also find out if your email design is triggering spam filters, and if there are any problems with your email's HTML code.
To use Inbox Vision you must have a valid email sending domain, and a valid subject line for your email.
Inbox Vision will default to the top 20 most popular email clients based on industry and expert guidance. You may also personalize your experience by selecting the previews that are most important and relevant to your program. You can define the default previews that should run every time.
Select the tabs to see a brief demo of Inbox Vision in a video and a list of written instructions.
Learn how to use Inbox Vision:
As you review the previews, pay close attention to the layout, images, and text formatting to ensure that your email looks across all platforms. If you notice any issues, return to the Braze Email Drag & Drop Editor to make the necessary adjustments and retest using Inbox Vision.
Before running or re-running Inbox Vision, refer to your capacity limits to determine how many of your monthly previews your test will use. Preview capacity limits reset at the beginning of the month.
Sending Test Emails
Once you've previewed the email, send yourself a test message. This makes it easy to check that links are working correctly, as well as testing other interactive elements.
To send an email to a test user, follow along with this video:
Learn more about email test sending, check out channel-specific test sending guidance in Braze documentation.