Braze Internal Groups: Content Test Group & Seed Group

Watch till the end for a new Braze feature that allows you to easily add any user profile to an Internal Group 🙏🏻

🗣️ WATCH FULL YOUTUBE VIDEO HERE 🗣

[Braze-mas 2023, Day 9]

What’s up everyone, my name is Allan, Founder and Consultant at For Now Marketing, and welcome to Day 9 of Braze-mas 2023!

In yesterday’s video, we explored Internal Groups, particularly the Event User Logs as that is, in my opinion, one of the most important yet underutilized feature in Braze.

Today, let’s go back to the Internal Group that we created and explore the other two features: Content Test Group and Seed Group.

Let’s get started!

Internal Groups

So we are back at the Settings → Internal Groups page, and here we see the first group called “Internal Group”, the default group created for all dashboards, and then the Nike-Braze Test Group, the group that we created together yesterday.

And you can actually see which capabilities our group is enabled for under this Properties column, and it is currently only enabled for User Events which allows us to check out Event User Logs.

We’re gonna change that by clicking on our Internal Group, and enabling both the Content Test Group and the Seed Group options. And another, smaller checkbox appeared which we will get to in a minute.

Content Test Group

So, let’s first talk about the Content Test Group. A Content Test Group is literally a content test group; it is a group of users who will receive test content when we’re building our Campaigns and Canvases. By putting these internal users inside a Content Test Group, this allows us to easily include them in the test recipient list.

So let’s say I’m working on my next push campaign, so from the Campaigns page, I click Create Campaign, push, type in “hello”, and I want to receive a test push to see how it currently looks. I click preview, Test Send, and this is where we can see the list of Content Test Groups that are available to receive this test push.

So you can see that our Nike-Braze Test Group shows up as an option. And yes, you can add individual email addresses manually for each send, but for members who are frequently involved with the QA process for your Braze messages, it’s best to create a Content Test Group to avoid the manual step of adding email addresses.

Now, if you go back to the Internal Groups page, and let’s say we checked off the “Automatically populate group as test send recipient” box.

Let’s refresh our campaign and go back to the Preview Test Send page, Then what happens is that our Content Test Group will always populate by default, saving us the step of having to add the group as a test recipient.

Now, if you have the exact same members as test recipients each time, I think this option can be convenient. However, if you have different members and stakeholders for each campaign, I suggest turning this off to avoid overwhelming someone’s inbox or device.

Also, most teams have a Content Test Group created for their wider Marketing team so that everyone can stay in the loop. Or you could create multiple Content Test Groups, one for the immediate Braze users, and a bigger test group that includes the stakeholders and executives for a final QA test.

One very interesting approach I’ve seen one team take is they created a Content Test Group for every member of the Marketing team individually. They had different stakeholders that needed to QA different campaigns, so it didn’t really make sense for them to group anyone together as the test recipients were different each time.

However, by creating a Content Group for each individual member, we were very conveniently able to enter them as recipients, and this still avoided the step of having to type in their full email addresses. A pro tip from a super smart team.

By the way, an email that was sent through this test send page will have square bracket “test” square bracket included in the beginning of the subject line, and that tag will definitely disappear in the real launch.

Seed Group

Back to our Internal Groups, this time, let’s talk about Seed Groups. Seed Groups are creating for the email channel only, and the members of the Seed Group will receive a copy of each email variant that gets launched. A seed email will have the tag square bracket “seed” square bracket in the beginning of the subject line, and it’s just a way for Braze to confirm that your email campaign has launched successfully, and also to provide you with an example of what that email looks like.

Now if you have multiple variants or multiple email steps like in a Canvas, you will get a seed email for each one, so just a heads up there. You may get many emails at once.

For Seed Groups, we build an email campaign, go to Target Audiences, scroll down to the bottom, and here’s our button for Edit Seed Groups where we can add the Nike-Braze Test Group once again. Now when this campaign gets launched for the first time, all members in the Nike-Braze Test Group will receive a Seed Email.

To summarize yesterday and today’s video, Internal Groups have 3 capabilities: Record User Events, create Content Test Group, and create an email Seed Group. All 3 features are very important and convenient for the Braze users of your Marketing team for future testing and QA processes.

Thank you!

That’s it for Day 9.

If you have any questions, please share them in the comments. We’re happy to help! 🙏

If you learned something from this video, please subscribe for more awesome Braze videos in the future!

Thank you for watching, and see you next time!

allan@fornowmarketing.com

fornowmarketing.com