Table of Contents
Introduction
As you begin to advance your email sending practices, you may find the necessity to test the performance of email content. This is helpful when determine content changes that help produce increased engagement and strong conversion rates. A/B testing is a feature in CharityEngine to use when you want to test email content and subject lines performance and determine which email drives better response from recipients. The differences in the email could be a simple image change or a subject line, or it could have multiple variants. A/B testing allows you to send multiple emails with these variations to a portion of your email list for testing purposes.
Prerequisites
-Prepare email content for your A & B email testing
-Identify test audience source to be used for your A & B email testing
Instructions: Setting Up Your Audience
Step 1: Navigate to the Campaigns App > Target & Test > Build Audience
You will be routed to the Query feature within CharityEngine
Step 2: Navigate to Create New
Step 3: Select your Filter and Select your data set
Step 4: Add your data elements by dragging and dropping fields into SELECT
Note: The CharityEngine Contact ID will be the minimum required field for this activity
Step 5: Drag and drop your data elements to FILTER to segment your list
Step 6: Click SAVE and name your query
Instructions: Setting Up Your Test
Step 1: To use CharityEngine A/B testing application, navigate to the Campaigns App > Target & Test > Set Up Tests > Create New
Step 2: You will need to name the test, select the type of test, the campaign the test is targeting, the media channel the test will be sent through, and if the target will be an email blast or a web form.
Note: the type selection is only for reporting purposes and will not reflect the overall outcome of the test. You will be able to select A/B testing if there is only one variation in the emails, or you will select multivariant test if there are multiple variants in the emails.
Once you have configured the basic options for the test, click Save and the Outbound Audience Segments tab will appear. On this tab you will be able to create the two or more emails that will be used in the test
Click the Create button to create the first email.
You will be navigated to a new page to name the first email, select the target query, and configure the percentage of contacts within the query that will receive the email.
When naming the first email, it is important to notate within the name the difference between the emails. For example, if one email has a hero image and one does not, the names could easily be email with hero image and email with no image.
The distribution split will determine the percentage of contacts that will receive the test email. For best practices and to determine the winner of the emails, you will want to select a small percentage of contacts and ensure both emails have the same percentage.
You can use this A/B testing to do a random segmentation of your list and send to the entire list at launch. To email this way, make sure your distribution split across your segments adds up to 100%.
You will also need to either search for an existing email or create a new email to be used for the test. Click Search to search for the previously existing email or Create to create a new email.
When searching for an existing email, you will be able to search by ID, Name, Subject line, when it was created, and the recipients of the email. For best practices, CharityEngine suggests searching by ID or Name of the email.
Once you have found the email creative you are looking for, click Select.
Click Save and navigate back to the Outbound Audience Segments Tab. You will now see the test email and be able to add the second email the same way you added the first.
Note: you will need to select the query again as well as all other settings.
Once both emails have been created, click the drop down next to the save button and click Launch. The two emails will be sent to the split percentages you configured.
