Open the email in Content Builder, select Preview and Test, choose a subscriber in the Subscriber Preview pane, click the envelope icon to reach the Test Send tab, enter up to five addresses in the Recipient field, complete From Options, and confirm on the Test Send Summary screen.
Before you run that a dozen times, one sentence from Salesforce's documentation is worth reading twice: a test send counts as a send in the application and against the threshold you purchased. Marketing Cloud has no separate test allowance. Every QA round draws down the same contracted volume as your campaigns, which makes this the most expensive test send in the category by a wide margin.
The second sentence makes it worse. Content Builder test sends are not recorded on the Send Log data extension. So a test costs you contracted volume and leaves no Send Log row to reconcile the spend against.
| Behavior | Marketing Cloud test send |
|---|---|
| Cost | Counts against your purchased send threshold |
| Send Log | Not recorded |
| Subject line | A qualifier is prepended, default [Test]: |
| Recipient cap | Five in the Recipient field, or a test data extension |
| Personalization | Renders only if you select a subscriber first |
| Spam scoring | None in the product |
Send a test email in Content Builder
The order of the steps matters more here than on other platforms, because skipping one silently changes the result.
- Open the email in Content Builder and select Preview and Test.
- In the Subscriber Preview pane, pick a list, group, data extension or audience, then select an individual subscriber. This renders AMPscript and personalization strings. It does not send that subscriber anything.
- Click the envelope icon to open the Test Send tab.
- Enter up to five addresses in the Recipient field, or select a test data extension.
- Complete the From Options section.
- Review the Test Send Summary, which surfaces warning and maximum thresholds, then click Confirm and Send.
Step 2 is the one that gets skipped. Complete the test send without selecting a subscriber first and the email goes out with personalization unrendered, which looks like broken AMPscript rather than a missed step.
The older Email Studio Send Preview flow still exists and behaves differently in one way worth knowing: it takes a single address in the To field, not five.
The subject line qualifier changes what you are testing
Marketing Cloud prepends a qualifier to the subject line of a test send, and Salesforce's Trailhead documentation gives the default value as [Test]:. The intent is reasonable: it marks the message so a reviewer knows it is not the real thing.
The side effect is that the subject line you evaluate is not the subject line you will send. Subject lines are scored, measured and rendered differently at different lengths, so a test with five extra characters in front is a test of a slightly different email. Across messages tested with Unspam this year, 78% pass the subject-line check, and the ones that fail generally fail on properties a prefix would disturb.
Clear the qualifier when you want a faithful test, and put it back when you want reviewers to be able to tell test mail from campaign mail in a shared inbox.
The five-address cap and the test data extension
The Recipient field takes up to five email addresses. The documented way past that is a test data extension containing all the subscribers for your test, and Salesforce states no cap for that path.
The step people miss is that a data extension does not appear as an option until Is Testable is selected on its Properties page. If your test data extension dropdown looks empty, that checkbox is almost always why, and nothing in the test send interface tells you.
Nothing in Marketing Cloud scores your content
There is no spam score, no SpamAssassin run and no content grading anywhere in Email Studio or Content Builder's Preview and Test. Salesforce's own overview of deliverability tooling, published in March 2023 and unchanged since, lists what it does provide, which is a genuinely substantial set: List Detective, Feedback Loop Automatic Processing, Bounce Mail Management, My Tracking, SPF and DKIM authentication, the Email Performance by Domain report, Subscriber Engagement, and Spam Complaints Over Time. It then points users to Google Postmaster Tools and Microsoft SNDS, and routes seed testing and inbox placement to AppExchange partners.
Read that list for what it is: reporting on mail that has already been sent, plus authentication setup. None of it answers where the message you are about to send will land, which is why the seeding half is delegated to partners.
Litmus previews are yours to buy, and Enterprise only
Rendering previews exist in Content Builder as Litmus Email Previews. From an email, go to the Preview and Test tab, click the Litmus icon, and sign in to Litmus. They are not included with Marketing Cloud: you need your own paid Litmus account, and an administrator has to grant a per-user Advanced Preview permission before the icon does anything.
The tier is where Salesforce's own pages disagree, and the disagreement is worth resolving before you buy. One Salesforce page says a Litmus Pro or Enterprise account; its FAQ says only Litmus Enterprise accounts can access this integration. Litmus is the authority on its own plans and states Enterprise on two of its pages, including its integration directory: an Enterprise plan is required for all Salesforce Marketing Cloud integrations. Budget for Enterprise.
Coverage is another place the numbers lag. Salesforce's page says 90 or more browsers, devices and clients. Litmus's own current pages say 100 or more. Neither is wrong so much as differently dated.
Engagement and Account Engagement are different products
One warning that will save an hour. Marketing Cloud Engagement, the product described here, and Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, formerly Pardot, share a brand and almost nothing else. Different interface, different test-send flow, its own preview feature. Nothing above has been verified against Account Engagement.
Whenever you search for Salesforce email instructions, check which product the answer is written for before following it.
When you need a real send instead
Once personalization renders and the layout holds, the remaining questions are about the send: whether your authentication passes as delivered, and where the message is filed at each provider. Given that test sends already bill against your threshold, a real send to a seed address costs you nothing extra and tells you considerably more.
Making an external address a real recipient in Marketing Cloud means putting it in a data extension with Is Sendable selected on the Properties page, rather than adding a contact the way other platforms work. The Salesforce Marketing Cloud deliverability guide covers that setup end to end. For placement, an inbox placement test delivers the email to seed mailboxes at Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo and five other providers and reports where each copy landed.
Of the campaigns run through Unspam so far this year, 65% of emails reach the primary inbox, and the Unspam deliverability benchmark tracks that by provider.
When the email is ready, run it through the free Unspam spam test with the qualifier cleared, so the subject line you score is the one you send.
