Campaign Monitor (along with all email campaign providers) is putting into place many new restrictions on how clients can use customer data stored on their platform. As a result, one of the more noticeable recent changes is that sending "test" emails with real customer data, to review pre-auth link functionality, is no longer permitted.
With that, in order to "test" your email campaigns before release, the team at Campaign Monitor has outlined some steps on how to test email releases that include pre-auth login links.
Campaign Monitor recommends following this process:
1 ) Duplicate your campaign draft.
2 ) Define the duplicate draft's recipients as a segment within your list that contains your own email address (and if you choose, additional co-workers on your team). Here's an example of how you'd build a segment that would contain just your own email address.
3 ) Be sure your email address contains the custom field personalization values that you want to test. Or, if you're testing dynamic content in your campaign, be sure you've updated the campaign so that the dynamic content will display for your new segment as well.
4 ) Fully send the duplicate campaign to just the segment that contains your email address. Fully sending campaigns to 5 recipients or fewer is always free.
5 ) That way, when the fully sent campaign arrives in your inbox, you can confirm if your personalization tags and dynamic content are working correctly.
For clients using MailChimp, Constant Contact, Vertical Response, or any other email marketing campaign provider, you may notice changes in functionality due to advanced privacy restrictions with the use of customer data.
No matter which platform your company uses to interact with customers, it may be wise to review your existing process for creating and testing email campaigns, well ahead of your next vintage release.
These elevated aspects of privacy, data usage consent, and data protection are the reality moving forward. Our best course is to embrace these changes on behalf of our customers, ensuring their right to privacy and protection of personal data.
We are happy to continue the conversation if you have questions.
–The Figure team