Registered for the forum just to comment on this; this is deal-breaking functionality as far as I'm concerned. It's available in Marketo and Salesloft, as well as many other email marketing platforms. It's required, and to see that it's requested for years and not implemented is extremely disappointing.
I'll likely be looking at alternative platforms to solve this.
It's very manual work if we have to turn on and off emails every time we want to test a new feature, subject line, content etc in a workflow. And if I do an A/B test on certain elements in a single-send email, it's not reliable data for me to fall back on since my audiences would have different intents. Help, Hubspot!
I do understand the rationale that automated emails send at different times thus you couldn't definitively say that version A is truly the winner, b/c we can't control time. However, if an automated email has been sent to 300 contacts, we can assume that across the 2 different a/b pools the submission times have averaged out - and thus attribute the success to the corresponding version.
That being said - the proposed option of sending out manual emails until we determine a winner is the least helpful "solution" ever. I'm sure MANY hubspot users have automated workflows that are triggered upon a new contact/lead submitting their information. To have someone on hand, ready to send an email as soon as someone has visited their website and provided their information is ludicrous. FURTHERMORE, they would be sending 1-off emails, and no simple way to actually track and analyze the success of the emails.
I still continue to be shocked by the seemingly obvious implementations and functions that Hubspot does not offer.
Currently the no automated email a/b testing option is worse than the option to a/b test automated emails, knowing that the results aren't necessarily 100% accurate.
Hubspot should make this one of their top priorities.
I don't understand how Hubspot being a platform so complete, it doesn't have this simple feature. EVERY sales automation platform I used/tested have this feature.
It is something that can make me decide to change my sales automation provider.
In the meantime while they absolutely need to sort this out. You could use properties to set up variables. I used the ownership field and set a workflow to auto-assign to one of 2 owners in a rotation. This gives you a 50-50 split test group. This also requires you to not be using the CRM as a CRM, however.
I imagine you can use a bit of excel magic to assign values similarly and append them to your email file to create the A/B lists.
Thank you all for sharing your feedback and use cases on this. The product team is currently thinking about how to solve this, and will post updates here.