How can I test ReachOut messages and what is the best way to QA my campaign to make sure it's good before I launch?
Okay, so here are some general best practices to assist with when you're testing your ReachOut campaigns. And really the first thing to keep in mind is that you can only receive, I have the dashboard here, you can only receive one message per campaign. So what this means is that once you've tested a campaign what you're going to need to do is clone that campaign if you want to make any tweaks and adjust further because you're not going to be able to receive that campaign again with the same machine.
So, I have my campaign here that I want to test. Let's assume that I've already kind of tested it with my machine. So if I want to tweak this campaign further, what I'm going to do is I'm going to hit this clone button and as you can see I've got this clone here of this previous campaign I'm going to have to change the date that I want to run this campaign over, but this is going to allow me to make any sort of tweaks or changes that I need to, to this already existing campaign and then test it again with my machine.
Next another thing to keep in mind is to make sure that the application itself is not actively running when you're activating the campaign. What this is going to do is it's going to help to ensure that once you activate the campaign you'll receive the message as soon as you launch your product. So essentially the correct order of steps is going to be to first close the product so I have my test product running here. What I'm going to do is I'm going to close this product and make sure that's not running.
Next we want to configure and save the ReachOut campaign so here's my test campaign I'm going to make sure that it's set to inactive. I'm going to label it as a clone test. Now I'm going to save this campaign. So I have my clone campaign it's been saved. It hasn't been activated yet, but that's the next step. So if I come back to my ReachOut menu essentially what I'm going to do is, I'm just going to refresh this to make sure that the page loads correctly. What I need to do is enable this campaign and at that point once I launch my product, I'll be receiving this message. So I'm going to activate this campaign. Now as soon as I launch my test product, we should see I received the ReachOut message right away.
So again just to kind of go through that series of steps... What we want to do is we want to make sure that the product is closed before I configure and activate my campaign. Then after I activate my campaign I launch my product and then I'll receive that respective message. Lastly just another tip to keep in mind, when testing ReachOut messages, is to make sure that the right filtering criteria is enabled so that only your specific machine or only the relevant group of machines is going to receive these messages. So typically most of our customers will want to configure within their test environment to make sure that campaigns look good before they launch these campaigns to a wide audience. So some filtering criteria to keep in mind that we recommend using to really just send this message to a single machine or a group of machines would be your unique client ID. So that client ID you can actually retrieve from your clients configuration file so on my machine is this file here that's associated with my installation so the client ID that's taken from that config file. Also my unique machine ID so that's the hardware fingerprint of my machine or also an internal build number
So if you know that you've got an internal build that only goes out to a handful of people within your organization. You can also optionally filter by that internal build number as well. I'll just to show you what that looks like within the campaign interface. You can see I've got my recipient profile filter again some some fields that we would recommend filtering off of is this product build this machine ID or also this unique client ID.
