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Sending a test SMS from a campaign

Before you send a campaign to your whole list, you can send a single test message to yourself or a teammate to see exactly how it looks on a real phone. It works much like sending a test of a newsletter: you pick a recipient, send, and stay right where you are in the campaign.

How to send a test

  1. Build your campaign and continue to the final Confirm and Send step
  2. Choose Send test SMS
  3. Pick a recipient from the list of your team members
  4. Choose Send test SMS in the dialog

Your draft is saved automatically when you open the test dialog, so you never lose your work. The campaign stays open behind the dialog, ready for you to send for real or go back and adjust something.

To whom can you send

You can only send a test to yourself or to a teammate who has a verified mobile number on their profile. Team members without a verified number appear greyed out in the list. You cannot type in a free phone number. If you have not verified your number yet, the dialog links you straight to your profile so you can do it, and your draft is kept safe while you do so.

The test looks exactly like the real send

The test message is identical to what your recipients will receive, including the unsubscribe link if your account adds one. The one difference: the unsubscribe link in a test is a harmless placeholder (it looks like a real link and takes up the same space, so the message length is accurate), and it cannot unsubscribe anyone. This means you can safely test a campaign on a colleague without affecting their subscription status.

It is billed like a normal send

A test message is sent through your campaign's real sender, so it is billed the same way as a real message. If you use your own 46elks account, it is sent there. If you use Brave-managed sending, it uses one SMS credit. There is a limit of 10 test messages per hour for each account.

Where test messages show up

Each test appears in the campaign's activity log with a Test label, so you can tell tests apart from real sends. Test messages are never counted in your campaign reports or delivery statistics.