My email list split test crashed hard last Tuesday

I set up an A/B test for a welcome email series using Mailchimp, trying two different subject lines. The plan was to send to 5,000 new subscribers over 48 hours. The system glitched and sent the losing variant to the entire list after just 100 opens. I had to pause the whole campaign and send a correction email, which looked super unprofessional. On one side, you just eat the loss and move on. On the other, you try to salvage data from the messed up send. Has anyone else had a platform fail like this and how did you handle the data?

3 comments

3 Comments

price.ben25d ago

Man... that's rough but is it really that big of a deal? People get a million emails a day and probably forgot about it already. I'd just scrap the test data and move on, trying to save it seems like a waste of time. These things happen, and making a whole thing out of it feels worse than the mistake itself.

mary_nelson7125d ago

Actually gotta disagree on this one. Forgetting about it is how small problems turn into massive fines later. That test data still has real info in it, and pretending it didn't happen is a liability. Better to own up, follow the rules for reporting, and fix the process so it doesn't happen again. Sweeping it under the rug just means the same mistake will probably happen next month.

susan_adams25d ago

Read an article that said ignoring small data leaks can lead to bigger compliance headaches later.