Organize Marketing Cloud instance [duplicate]

Question

I am trying to figure out the best way to organize a Marketing Cloud instance. I want to get the best way to do so as the Multi-org is not an option (Data streams and Journey Builder do not work) and there is no other way to connect one BU to Salesforce production environment and another BU to sandbox environment.

The only way I can think about is to create a BU for testing, create testing data that replicates the data in the production BU and when everything is as expected, copy one by one all the contents, filters, emails, queries, automations... to the production. With emails, I could share them to the production environment so all the content resides in the test BU.

Any clue if this is the only way to maintain a test and production environments in Marketing Cloud or if there is another workaround?

Answer 1

You can use PROD data for testing by swapping out the subscriber key, email address and mobile number with test data.

You could do this by modifying the data before it reaches your account or within your account by using a query.

This would allow you to test without having to duplicate your efforts.

Note that if you have any kind of reporting data going out of SFMC to say a dashboard you can also exclude your test records from these.

Source: I've implemented two such approaches and have also worked with a copy process such as you described.