Preview and Test Your Email
We recommend that you always preview and test your email before sending to your subscribers.
Get the job done with a pro
From training to full-service marketing, our community of partners can help you make things happen.
Merge tags insert personalized or dynamic content from your audience into your signup forms or emails. We recommend that you preview and test your merge tags before your email goes out to make sure everything works the way you expect.
In this article, you'll learn how to test and troubleshoot merge tags in your emails and signup forms.
Here are some things to know before you begin this process.
Use preview mode to preview and test your email content before you send it. Preview mode is available for all emails, and allows you to enable live merge tag info to see how they'll look for each contact. Search for a specific email address or use the arrows to view how merge tags and dynamic content look for recipients who match your conditions.
If you're working with the new email builder, we'll mark invalid merge tags with an exclamation point icon as you add your content. To see the total number of merge tag issues, click the Suggestions panel.
To run a test of the merge tags in your signup forms or response emails, sign up through your form and review how the merge tags appear in each step of the process. As you fill out forms and receive emails, you should see your audience field merge values appear where you added merge tags in the Form Builder. If the right information appears in those places, your merge tags are working.
Merge tags can be tricky. If you see behavior you don’t expect, consider these possibilities.
If you haven't selected an audience in the builder checklist, merge tags that reference specific audience data will display as invalid. Return to the checklist and add your recipients in the To section, then continue to design your email.
Contact-specific merge tags, such as *|FNAME|*, pull field data from your audience to generate personalized content. When you send a test email, we can't replace the tags with any data because we only have the email address you provided. Instead, you’ll need to use Preview Mode with Enable live merge tag info toggled on, or send a live email to a small test segment of your audience.
Different audiences often have different merge tags, depending on whether you added default values for merge tags when the audience was created. If your merge tags aren’t populating, make sure they correspond to the correct audience. To learn more, check out Set Default Merge Values for an Audience.
If it still seems like merge tags aren't working, send a test email to yourself or to a small test segment. Be sure your test email accounts have default values for each merge value in your email, and segment your audience to send to only these test addresses.
Technical Support
Have a question?
Paid users can log in to access email and chat support.
We recommend that you always preview and test your email before sending to your subscribers.
Merge tags let you insert dynamic content in your campaigns. Get a list containing each merge tag and how to use it.
These cookies are strictly necessary to provide you with the services and features available through our site. Because these cookies are strictly necessary to deliver the site, you cannot refuse them without impacting how the site functions.
These cookies are used to enhance the functionality and performance of the site. They help us to customize the site and application for you in order to enhance your experience. While these cookies are not needed for a basic website experience, certain functionalities such as personalization and video would become unavailable.
These cookies are used to make advertising messages more relevant to you and your interests. They also perform functions like preventing the same ad from continuously reappearing, ensuring that ads are properly displayed, and in some cases selecting advertisements that are based on your interests.
These cookies collect information to help us understand how the site is being used or how effective our marketing campaigns are. They help us to know which pages are the most and least popular and to see how visitors move around the site. These cookies may be set by us or by third-party providers whose services we have added to our pages.