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Introduction to the QA Center

Blair Matheson
  • Updated

A personalized template can look right for the customer you happened to preview and wrong for everyone else. Checking each segment by hand means finding a customer for each one, typing their ID, and remembering which ones you already looked at. The QA Center solves this by letting you save the customers you test with once, and use them on every template you preview.

In this article, you will learn what the QA Center is, what it lets you do, and where to find it.

What is the QA Center?

The QA Center is Content Studio's home for testing templates before they go out. You'll find it under Plan → Content Studio → QA Center, and it opens on Test Groups. Instead of previewing one random customer at a time, marketers can:

  • Save test groups of up to 10 real customer IDs, one for each case your personalization handles, such as each VIP tier, region, or language.
  • Label each customer in a group, so every preview shows which case that customer covers.
  • Preview a template for every customer in a group with Smart Preview, which steps through each customer and each variant. A group of three customers and a template with three variants gives nine previews.
  • Send the version you're looking at to an inbox, with that customer's data.
  • Reuse the same group on every template, so a team can agree on one set of test customers.

The outcome: you see every version of a personalized email, for the customers it was built for, before a campaign goes out.

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Note: A test group holds up to 10 customer IDs, and an account can have up to 1,000 test groups. Every customer ID in a group must belong to a real customer in your account before the group can be saved.

Viewing Results in Smart Preview

Test groups are used in Smart Preview, which opens when you preview a template:

  1. Open your template and click Preview.
  2. Under Preview template as:, select Test Group and pick a group.
  3. In the preview, you can:
    • See the customer ID and their labels, shown as Key Segments, so you can trace a wrong offer to the segment it came from.
    • Step through every customer and variant with the arrows.
    • Send a test of the version you're looking at.

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A test group is only as useful as the customers in it. Pick them for coverage, not at random: one customer per tier, region, or language shows you every branch of your personalization, and a customer with missing data shows you your fallback content. A random customer shows you one version. Because each preview names the customer and their labels, a wrong offer leads you straight back to the segment that caused it.

To create your first test group, see How to Create and Manage Test Groups. To preview and test a template with it, see Previewing and Testing Templates with Smart Preview. For common questions, see QA Center FAQs.

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