QA-ing a Program with an A\B test

[Rich_French1]

Love the built in A\B test functionality of the Email Program!  Does anyone have a good process for QA-ing the entire program flow that includes an A\B test email?  More specifically, we're trying to test the status and data updates that occur when the prospect opens the email and clicks on the links.  We typically do this through an email send flow step where we send the email to our test leads.  Once the A\B test is in place in the Email Program we can't get the sample message to send via a flow step.  We can select the "Subject Line Test" in the flow but we never receive the message.  Do we have to run all the QA before we enable the A\B test or is there another workaround?

[Jim_Thao7]

I don't believe that this scenario works with batch campaigns (I'm not sure why, but I know for sure it doesn't).  You can use the a/b test in a trigger campaign and it should work as expected. 

[Kim_Allen]

Hey Rich,

If your team prefers to use Email Blasts over Email Sends (the mailbox with this built-in functionality) I'd recommend going "old school" - you'd need to create 2 emails (easy to clone and change the subject line) and then in the flow step you'd add the "Random Sample" criteria into the Send Email step. If you want half to get each your random sample would be 50.

As a whole email blast programs allow for a lot more flexibility and testing than sends which it sounds like you all do - so I'd probably go that route.

Kim