Resend policy on subject line testing

[Anonymous]

We have been testing some rather convoluted logic for a new nurture program. I am *certain* there's an efficient way to do this, but the only method I've come up with so far is really kludgy, so I'm throwing it out to the community for ideas (or to Marketo to implement as a future feature? 😉 ).

TL;DR: how to create a resend policy on A/B testing, which sends an alternate variant.

So we have a single email with six possible subject lines. There are three specific response-type groups we want to test (1, 2, 3), and each one of these responses would receive one of two subject lines (1a, 1b, 2a, 2b, 3a, 3b). Fairly straightforward up to this point.

However, we also want to implement a resend policy, where any member of group 1 who didn't open 1a would then be sent 1b two weeks later; 1b would get 1a two weeks later, and so on... In a regular Marketo program, of course, we can do this, but only (as far as I've been able to figure out) by cloning the email into six copies. But that's a mess: we only have the one email but with six subject line variants. Has anyone come up with a way to resend to a subject line test group, restricting ...

Holy crap. I think I just answered my own question: subject line my.tokens.

But let's keep going with this. Any other ideas?

[Anonymous]

my.Tokens would let you save on # of assets, but you'd still have to go in and fix your token every week, right?

Here's a hairbrained idea:

I imagine this could potentially be done with a custom field too - smart campaign that does the sending first checks if they opened the first email. If not, it does a data value update to a custom field on the lead called "nurture subject line" to be the next subject line (I think you could even leverage a {{my.token}} in this data value change to save yourself the trouble of fussing in the smart campaign settings). Then your email asset's subject line is simply: "{{lead.nurture subject line}}". Each time an email is prepped for sending, Marketo checks to see if they opened the last one, and if not, rewrites the subject line to the next one.

Obviously this doesn't scale well with multiple campaigns because you'd otherwise require a field for every darn email you send. You'd also have to work through some interesting data problems with ensuring the value is always populated on any leads in your nurture, otherwise you risk sending an email with no subject line.

So in reality, this idea probably isn't a really great one from a functional perspective. But I'm just spitballing here.

[Anonymous]

Cool idea, but you're right--that wouldn't scale and this nurture program is eventually going to be Rather Large. So I'm back to simply cloning emails for now.

More spitballs, please!

[Anonymous]

And, nuts: the my.token idea didn't work either.

[Anonymous]

Marketo, my friends!! What would be HUGELY helpful here would be a way to add a constraint to the Flow step as well as the Smart List (the constraint doesn't exist as far as I can tell, in the flow steps), where

Smart List: If was sent Email 1 :: Test Variant > Subject A

Flow: If Email 1 was not opened > Send Email 1 :: Test Variant > Subject B

Pretty pleez?

[Anonymous]

Wait: Wait!! Marketo, did I just solve this?

[Anonymous]

Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnd, the answer is no. Does anyone know of a method that would actually do what I'm trying to do in the screenshot above?