If you've ever rolled out an automated reply workflow and held your breath on go-live day, this one's for you.
Today we're launching the ERM Test Suite, a built-in testing environment for every Email Reply Management workspace. It gives marketing ops and lifecycle teams a fast, structured way to validate that incoming replies are being categorized correctly, that the right fields are being extracted, and that downstream actions fire the way you expect — all before any of it runs against real inbound mail.
Why we built it
Reply management lives in a high-stakes part of the funnel. A misclassified out-of-office can stall a deal. A missed unsubscribe is a compliance risk. A bounced reply that gets treated like an interested response wastes the SDR cycle it triggers.
Until now, the only way to validate those edges was to push changes live and watch what happened. The Test Suite changes that. It turns reply categorization into something you can QA the same way you'd QA a smart campaign, a routing rule, or a scoring change — deliberately, before release. It's the same testing discipline we baked into list operations, now applied to the inbound side.
What you can do with it
- Run the baseline suite out of the box. Every workspace ships with pre-built tests covering the OOTB categorizations, so you can validate your environment in minutes.
- Add custom tests for your edge cases. Paste in a real reply, set the expected category, and the suite locks that behavior in as a regression check.
- Validate extracted fields, not just categories. Add extraction checks with Exact matching for structured values (dates, amounts, order numbers) or Semantic matching for free-text fields the model may paraphrase.
- Run the whole suite or a single test. Use Run All before a release; use the inline Run button while iterating on a single case.
- See state at a glance. Filter by status (passing, failing, not run) or by categorization to focus on what's actually changing.
Who it's for
If you own ERM in your stack — whether that's a marketing ops lead validating a new categorization, a lifecycle marketer rolling out a custom skill, or a RevOps team running recurring health checks on the OOTB classifiers — the Test Suite is built to slot directly into the way you already work.
It's the release gate your reply automations have been missing.
Get started
The Test Suite is live now in every ERM workspace. Open the Test Suite tab to see your baseline tests, then click + New Test to add your first custom case.
For the full walkthrough — including best practices on naming conventions, writing assertions, and choosing between Exact and Semantic comparisons — head to the ERM Test Suite documentation.
Happy testing.
