Fresh out of an Eloqua University class on testing campaigns, I've just embarked on my first test of an active campaign. Per the class's suggestion, our team created a copy of the campaign, changed all the time intervals to 0.1 hours, changed the segment to a "test team" segment, and let it fly.
However, the results were not as informative as we might have expected.
The good news is that we have developed a robust checklist of what to look for before activating campaigns. The bad news is that, because our campaigns usually have decision steps in them, we can't easily test all paths or even route the contacts down the path with, say, the most emails. If a decision step is "Opened email?" we need to make sure we open the email before the next step in the campaign fires -- obviously not always possible. The alternative would be to simplify the "test" campaign to send the contacts all down the path you want to test -- but then this becomes less useful as a true test of the campaign logic. Another example was when using a form processing step to send contacts into the campaign, they went into our ORIGINAL campaign, and then the desired action did not fire because the original campaign was, of course, not active.
At times, in my professional life I have made it a point to test things almost to the point of silliness -- I am a bit too fond of telling the story of how calling the phone number on a brochure at the press check saved a client from having to reprint the brochure -- but this way of doing things does not seem to be any better as a test than manually sending oneself all the emails, checking the links, and submitting the forms . . . and then saying a little prayer that any Cloud Connectors you have included in the campaign will work properly on activation.
What are your thoughts, Eloqummunity?