From within the Constant Contact email editor, click Preview & Test, then Send Test. Type the addresses, pressing the space bar or Enter after each one, up to five. Add an optional Personal Note if you want, then click Send test.
What arrives is a modified version of your campaign, and Constant Contact documents each modification. It carries a banner at the bottom marking it as a test. The Unsubscribe and Update Profile links in the footer do not work. Personalization, dynamic content blocks, dynamic links and click segmentation do not work either. And the contact detail tokens display the personal information you provided for your own account, rather than a recipient's.
That last one is the quiet problem. A test email with your own name filled into every token looks correct. Nothing is visibly broken, so nothing gets fixed, and the first time the tokens meet a real contact record is the live send.
| What you want to check | Does a Constant Contact test send answer it |
|---|---|
| Layout and copy | Yes |
| Whether personalization resolves for a contact | No. Tokens fill from your own account record |
| Whether dynamic content blocks display correctly | No |
| Whether the unsubscribe link works | No. Footer links are disabled in a test |
| Whether the email is clipped by the recipient's client | Partly. If the test banner is missing, it was clipped |
| Whether it lands in spam | No. Constant Contact has no spam scoring |
Send a test email in Constant Contact
- Open the email in the editor.
- Click Preview & Test, then Send Test.
- Type each address, pressing the space bar or Enter key after each one. Up to five.
- Optionally add a Personal Note. Constant Contact confirms this note is only visible on the test send and will not display on the real campaign, which makes it the right place to tell reviewers what changed.
- Click Send test.
Constant Contact's documentation for this was last updated on 24 July 2026.
Two separate limits, and one of them locks the feature
The number people quote is five, which is the per-send cap. The limit that actually catches teams out is the daily one, and it splits by address.
You can send an unlimited number of tests to email addresses verified on your account. To anything else, you are limited to 50 test emails to unverified addresses in a 24-hour period. Exceed it and the feature is restricted rather than throttled, with an account restriction message rather than a warning.
The practical advice follows directly: verify the addresses your team tests from. A reviewer whose address is verified costs you nothing, and one whose address is not draws on a pool of 50 shared across everyone.
The test banner doubles as a clipping check
Constant Contact adds a banner at the bottom of a test send denoting that it is a test, with one documented exception: the banner will not appear if the email is so long that the receiving email program cuts it off.
That turns an annoyance into a diagnostic. If you send yourself a test and the banner is missing, your email was clipped before its end. Gmail clips messages over roughly 102 KB and hides the remainder behind a link, taking your call to action and your unsubscribe footer with it. The banner is the cheapest clipping test you have, and it costs nothing to read.
Nothing in Constant Contact scores your content
Constant Contact publishes a help center article titled "Check your spam score". It contains no spam score. The documented procedure is to send one of your campaigns to a third-party tool such as Mail-Tester or MailGenius, and read the verdict on someone else's site.
It is unusual for a vendor to be that direct, and the advice is sound as far as it goes. There is a catch specific to Constant Contact that its article does not mention, and it follows from everything above: if you use Send Test to mail your draft to a scoring tool, you are scoring a message that carries an injected test banner, is missing its unsubscribe footer links, and shows unresolved personalization. The score you get back describes a message none of your subscribers will receive.
Send a real campaign to a one-contact list instead, and score that.
Inbox Preview is a paid add-on, and the free preview is not the same thing
Two features are easy to conflate here.
The free preview, inside Preview & Test, shows a Desktop or Mobile view rendered in your browser, and lets you enter a contact's email address and click View to see personalized content. It is a responsive layout mock-up, not a real client rendering.
Inbox Preview is a paid add-on at $10 USD per month, powered by Litmus, granting 25 previews per month with no rollover. It reaches the Inbox tab from the same Preview & Test screen and shows genuine client renderings, including dark mode variants.
If your emails render badly for a specific segment, the add-on is worth the ten dollars. If you just want to know that the layout stacks on a phone, the free preview already told you.
When you need a real campaign send instead
Every difference listed above disappears on a real send. Personalization resolves against the contact record. The footer links work. No banner is injected. And the message authenticates the way your campaigns authenticate.
Making an external seed address a real recipient takes two steps: add it through Contacts, then Add contacts, then Add a single contact, expanding Advanced settings to choose the list it joins, and then send a real campaign to a list containing only that contact. The Constant Contact deliverability guide covers that setup. For where the message lands, an inbox placement test delivers it to seed mailboxes at Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo and five other providers and reports the result per provider.
Of the campaigns run through Unspam so far this year, 65% of emails reach the primary inbox, and the Unspam deliverability benchmark tracks how that splits.
When the campaign is ready, run it through the free Unspam spam test as a real send, with the footer intact and the tokens resolved.
