In the Mailchimp email designer, click Send a Test Email, enter the address, and click Send Test. Separate multiple addresses with a comma. In the older legacy builder the same control lives under the Preview drop-down, which is why two different sets of instructions circulate for one task.
Two things happen that Mailchimp documents clearly and almost nobody reads. The first: every email you send counts toward your monthly send limit or uses a Pay As You Go credit, whether it is a test or a live email. Testing is not free here, and on a plan where the send limit binds, it is a real budget. The second matters more. Test emails sent from the template builder are not associated with an audience, so the From email address will be your primary account email address rather than the campaign's.
That substitution changes what you are testing. The From domain is the identity DKIM alignment and DMARC are evaluated against, so a template-builder test is authenticated as a different sender from the campaign it stands in for.
| What you want to check | Where to do it in Mailchimp |
|---|---|
| Layout and copy | Send a Test Email, from either builder |
| Merge tags resolving for a real subscriber | Preview mode with a contact selected, not a test send |
| The campaign's real From address | Test from the campaign, not the template builder |
| Whether links resolve | Link Checker, not available for Code Your Own templates |
| Rendering across email clients | Inbox Preview, 25 tokens a month, one token per client |
| Whether it lands in spam | Nothing in Mailchimp answers this |
Send a test email in Mailchimp
The path depends on which builder your account is using, and both are still documented because both are still in service.
New email designer. Open the email, click Send a Test Email, type the recipients separated by commas, and click Send Test.
Legacy builder. Open the Preview drop-down and choose the test option from there.
If the From address is part of what you are checking, start from the campaign rather than from a saved template, for the reason above. If you only want to see whether the hero image loads on a phone, the template builder is fine.
Every Mailchimp test email spends a send
Mailchimp is the most explicit platform in this category about the cost of testing, and the sentence is worth quoting exactly: every email you send counts toward your monthly send limit or uses a Pay As You Go credit, whether it is a test or a live email.
Do the arithmetic on a normal review cycle. Twelve iterations, four people copied on each, and the campaign has spent forty-eight sends before a subscriber sees it. That is invisible on a large plan and material on a small one, and it is the reason to use preview mode for layout iterations and reserve test sends for the versions that are nearly final.
Merge tags and dynamic content do not resolve in a test
Mailchimp states that contact-specific merge tags and dynamic content will not work in test emails. The practical consequence is that a personalization bug can survive every round of testing and appear for the first time in the live send, in front of the whole list.
Preview mode is the feature that does resolve them. Select a specific contact and Mailchimp renders the email with that subscriber's actual values, which is the only way to see what a real recipient will read.
Inbox Preview costs 25 tokens a month, and the plan gate is unclear
Inbox Preview is Litmus-powered and generates screenshots of your campaign across email clients and devices. Paid monthly Marketing accounts receive 25 Inbox Preview tokens each month, unused tokens expire at the end of each billing cycle, and each time you create or update a preview the cost is one token.
The token maths is tighter than it looks. Checking one campaign across ten clients spends ten tokens. Fixing something and re-checking spends ten more. Two thorough passes on one campaign is most of a month.
Mailchimp's two help pages disagree on who can use it. The Inbox Preview page says it requires a paid monthly Marketing plan. The preview-and-test page says it is included with the Standard plan or higher. Both are live, both are Mailchimp's, and one of them is stale. Check what your own account offers rather than trusting either.
Nothing in Mailchimp tells you whether a message lands in spam
Inbox Preview renders. Link Checker validates URLs. Neither sends a message through a mailbox provider's filters, so neither can report placement, and Mailchimp has no spam score anywhere in the product.
The gap is not a criticism of Mailchimp so much as a description of the category: a sending platform sees what it sent, not what the receiving provider decided. 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 moves quarter to quarter.
Authentication is the part a test send is least able to show you and the part that most often explains a placement problem. Across the same set of messages tested with Unspam, 93% of senders publish a valid SPF record and 90% pass DKIM, but only 49% publish a DMARC policy, which leaves the majority with the one record that ties the other two to the domain a reader actually sees.
When you need a real send instead
Once the layout is right and the links check out, the open questions all need a message that travelled the campaign path: the audience's From address, a real DKIM signature, live tracking links, and a working unsubscribe.
The Mailchimp deliverability guide covers that setup, including how to add seed addresses as a tagged segment without tripping Omnivore. For placement, an inbox placement test sends the campaign to seed mailboxes at Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo and five other providers and reports where each copy was filed.
When the campaign is ready, run it through the free Unspam spam test first, from the audience it will really go out to.
