What’s the risk of testing automations with real recipients?

Testing with real recipients carries significant risks:

Unintended sends: Test emails reach actual customers. Customers receive irrelevant, confusing, or duplicate messages. Brand perception suffers from obvious testing mistakes.

Metric contamination: Test sends skew engagement metrics. Performance data becomes unreliable. Decisions based on contaminated data may be wrong.

Consent concerns: Sending test emails may violate consent expectations. Using customer data for testing has privacy implications. Some regulations restrict data use for testing.

Relationship damage: Customers lose trust in brands that send errant emails. Complaints and unsubscribes from confused recipients. Difficult to explain or apologize effectively.

Safer alternatives: Internal seed lists for live testing. Staging environments with synthetic data. Dry-run modes that log without sending. Small, consented test panels if real data needed.

The cost of a testing mistake can far exceed the cost of proper test infrastructure.