Campaign Email A/B Testing

An important tool in a mass mailing strategy is A/B testing. This allows you to test different versions of your campaign emails against randomly selected segments of your audience. Find out what subject lines are most effective, or where you might place links. You might even offer different products or headlines to learn which ones are most appealing to your audience.

When it comes to campaign email, there are two basic types of A/B tests:

• A/B splits: 50% of your audience gets one version, 50% of your audience gets another. This is most useful when you are trying to establish general design principles for your audience and get information for future mailings. For example, perhaps you are trying to decide whether you are better off with links that say "Read more" or "Click here for more". An A/B split will be a useful way to make a decision which you can apply to future mailings.

• A/B/Final tests: 10% of your audience gets one version, 10% of your audience gets another, then pick the better version and send to the remaining 80%. This is most useful for optimizing a particular mailing. For example, you could come up with two subject lines and try them both out. When you determine which one is better, you can use it on the rest of your list, so 90% of your audience will get the most effective subject line.

Create the first version of your email campaign as normal. Under the Schedule Send tab, click either A/B Test or A/B Split. Your campaign email will be split into two or three different campaign emails which can each individually be modified.

A new tab will appear called A/B Test. In this tab you can customize the percentages for each version of the blast and take a quick peek at the performance of tests that have been sent so far.

Modify each version of the test as you like. Try different subject lines or changes to the content. You can send test emails of each version to yourself to make sure it's right. When you are ready to send tests, you can schedule each version individually as normal (using the Schedule Send tab), or you can send all tests immediately by pressing the Send All Tests button under the A/B Test tab.

After your A/B tests are sent out, they can be reported on just like any other campaign emails in the Email Campaign Report section of Reports.

If you are performing an A/B split, you're done. Just watch the results come in. If you are doing an A/B/Final test, on the other hand, you will want to view the results and use them to determine what the final version will look like.

If you click on the [Final] version of the campaign email from the Email Campaigns page, then click on the A/B Test tab, you can see the results of the test thus far. When you pick one version as better than the other, you can click Set As Final to make the final version identical to that winning version. You can also further modify the Final version, if you like.

When you've set the Final version and are ready to send, schedule it just like any other campaign email and watch your optimized results come in.