A/B Testing a series of drip emails

[stacenic]

Hi All!

I am fairly familiar with a/b testing when it comes to utilizing it in an email program for a 1-time 1 email send. That process is straight forward. My confusion is coming from when I need to set up a/b testing for a series of several emails. The outline of the campaign/program is as follows:

-this program is for an event we are running this quarter - this is not an engagement program, no streams, all emails are sent via flow steps in a smart campaign

-we have 2 smart campaigns for two different audiences, within each smart campaign (not triggered but filtered), there are flow steps to send a series of emails to get people to register 

-my content team is requesting we a/b test the subject lines for each email we are sending, I am reading about champion/challenger emails but I am not sure how to apply that to this scenario. It seems to make sense for ongoing campaigns, to eventually chose the winning subject line, but since we are only sending each email once, I'm not entirely sure how to A/B test the subject line for each email we are sending in our flow. The flow works like this "wait until x date, send email 1" "wait until x date, send email 2" and so on and so forth. People are removed from the flow once they have registered.

Appreciate any input thank you! 

[Courtney_Tobe2 · Accepted solution]

Hi! 

Since the use case that you're proposing below is for a series of one off email sends, I would suggest building out nested email programs underneath your webinar program so that you can leverage the full capabilities of the A/B testing available within an email program. Understanding Email Programs - Nesting

You could also use Champion/Challenger in this use case, but in order for it to work, the smart campaign has to be a trigger based send, not a batch. If you set it up as a batch send, the A/B test won't work correctly. Champion/Challenger Emails Explained At the end of the Champion/Challenger test period, it will ask you to declare a winner, but you don't have to do complete this step if you aren't leveraging the same email for future sends. Hope this helps.