Maxemail has had a powerful A/B Split Testing function for many years, that allows you to easily test anything about your email campaigns, to random samples of your lists. We have now enhanced this to make it even easier and quicker to use, allowing you to automate the picking of a winner for when you are not around to do so.
Here is a screenshot of the updated Split Testing screen:
Here you can see there are new icons along the top to open, copy, delete or create emails for this Split Test. The best way of adding different versions into the test, is to create one version you are happy with, copy it and change the one element you are testing in the other emails.
The other new icon in here is the “New Winner…” option. This opens the following dialogue box:
Simply select which metric Maxemail should decide the winning version upon. For example selecting “Total Unique Opens” will mean Maxemail chooses the winner that has the highest percentage of unique opens.
The next dropdown allows you to specify when the winner should be picked and sent to the remaining people on your list, which have not already received one of these emails:
When you do start using the updated feature, remember these key elements of best practice:
- Leave it long enough for results to become clear – even a subject line test might take 12 hours to be reliable
- Use a sample size of at least 2,500 people per test, ideally 5,000
- Change only one thing per test, otherwise you will have no idea what impact each element has had. This includes when you send the email, so make sure you send the tests at the same time
- Choose the right statistic to pick your winner from. While open rate might appear to be the best statistic for a subject line test, we often prefer to use click-thru rate. This is because if one subject line is directly related to the offer at the top of the email, this might generate more clicks, even if less people open it. After all these people are opening the email because of what is in the subject line.
The new ‘A/B Split Testing’ function will be available 9th May, 2011, as part of the V6 release.
Over the last few weeks various brands have decided it’s a good idea to fill my inbox with irrelevant junk which tries to work on the back of the World Cup. The problem with this is many of the links are extremely tenuous – ‘England are out so treat yourself to something nice’ has been the constant theme this week. It’s so predictable I know the email is coming before I receive it.
