SFMC Testing Environment (Sandbox) and Deployment Management

SFMC Testing Environment (Sandbox) and Deployment Management

This is one of the most popular questions we face as consultants when planning a Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) implementation.

And despite my enthusiasm on the 1st of April 2021, in front of someone tweet: “finally we can download an SFMC sandbox”, I am gutted to confirm that was an April’s fool and such a treasure does not exist.

Things have improved with the launch of Deployment Manager and Package Manager, however, we are nowhere near the tools and DevOps process available in Sales Cloud.

In this article, I will highlight some of the approaches available to you when faced with this challenge.

First of all, do you really need a testing environment?

If your need is to test assets, such as emails, dynamic blocks, SMS, push notification and landing pages and how they render then creating a testing environment is overkill.

In SFMC, you can test the majority of the assets using the preview and test functionality.
It is also available a testing functionality within journey builder that allows to test the different paths of the journey and send test emails to a pre-defined email address when using data extensions entry.