In other words, it’s a way to test which campaign is the most effective to increase the engagement of your contacts, in terms of opens, clicks, or purchases. You can choose what you want to test (content, subject, from name) and compare the results, as even marginal improvements in drop-off rates can represent a significant gain in sales.
Creating an A/B Campaign
Perform the following steps to create a new A/B Campaign:
- In Navigation, go to CAMPAIGNS and select Email Campaigns. On the Email Campaigns page, click NEW CAMPAIGN.
- On the Create New Campaign page, click A/B Email Campaign.
- On the New A/B Campaign page, in step 1, provide the A/B campaign details.
- In the Campaign Information section, enter the name of the campaign. Then, enter the 'from email' and 'reply to' email addresses.
- In the Contacts section, select the target group(s) from the given options; lists, segments, suppress lists, suppress segments, suppress workflows. You may also select a campaign tag with which to associate your campaign.
- The Address and Language fields are pre-populated based on the value entered on the Account & Billing page, which you may change for the campaign.
- Enable the Show email preview link toggle to attach an option for email preview. When the toggle is enabled, the text "If you are having trouble viewing this email, click here” is automatically inserted into the top of your campaign.
- Click NEXT.
- In Step 2 of the New A/B Campaign page, select the winning criteria for A/B testing.
The following options are available:
- Top Choices: The campaign sent to the final group combines the subject line and from name from the test group having the highest open rate together with the content from the test group having the highest click rate.
- Highest Open Rate: Everything from the email sent to the test group having the highest open rate is replicated and sent to the final group.
- Highest Click Rate: Everything from the email sent to the test group having the highest click rate is replicated and sent to the final group.
- Manual Selection: Enables you to select everything after viewing the reports for the final campaign.
- Highest Click-to-Open Rate: Everything from the email sent to the test group having the highest click-to-open rate is replicated and sent to the final group.
- Highest Conversion Rate: Everything from the email sent to the test group having the highest conversion rate is replicated and sent to the final group.
- Enter the split group information for the A/B test. You must fill in all fields for split groups. Two or more groups are required for an A/B split test to be sent. You can select different content, subjects, 'from names', pre-headers, and 'send at' times for all different groups. Allocate a percentage to each group, the sum of percentage allocations should not exceed 100%.
Note: The percentage you don’t allocate to split groups will be automatically allocated to the final group (for example, you only send to 70% of the lists, the remaining 30% will be sent to the final group). If the allocated percentages add up to 100%, there will be no emails sent to the final group based on the winning criteria. You can also set a schedule for when the final campaign will be sent.
Duplicating Test Groups: If you want to send your A/B Campaign to more than two test groups, you can simply duplicate the split groups and enter different values for the new ones. To create duplicate split groups, select the test groups and then click the Duplicate icon at the top right corner.
Note: The Duplicate and Delete icons for the split groups are disabled until a split group is selected. You can select multiple split groups to duplicate or delete in bulk.
- Optionally, you can send a test email for the campaign. Enter up to 30 recipients for the test email and click Send Test.
Note:
- The test email recipients do not have to be from the same contact lists that you have selected for the campaign.
- You can select up to 20 contacts in the form of contact lists and manually enter up to 10 contacts in the form of email addresses.
- You can select multiple lists for the test email but the total contacts must be limited to 20.
- Optionally, you can use the Pre-Send Calculation toggle button to start calculating the audience three hours prior to sending the campaign. You can use the option to prevent any possible delays in delivering campaigns that contain a lot of segments or suppressions.
Note:
- The Pre-Send Calculation option can be used only if you are scheduling the campaign to be sent after at least three hours. If you enable the Pre-Send Calculation toggle button and schedule the campaign for under three hours, you will get an error.
- Once the Pre-Send Calculation begins working (three hours before send time), the campaign gets locked and you can no longer edit the campaign details. However, you can edit the items selected in the campaign. For example, you cannot select different content for the campaign, but you can edit the selected content in the content editor.
- Click the SAVE button to save the campaign as a draft, SCHEDULE CAMPAIGN to schedule the campaign to be sent, or SEND NOW to send the campaign regardless of the scheduled send time.
Note:
The option for scheduling the campaign is available only if:
- A winning criteria other than Manual Send is selected.
- The total size of the test groups is < 100%.
