A/B Split Testing Campaign Emails

The most important thing for any successful event is, of course, selling tickets. When you send out your event invitations using Symphony’s Campaign Email Management System, it’s essential that the design and content of the invitation is of a high quality and effective at achieving a good response rate or any desired outcome.

There are many elements which can affect the response rate of an email marketing campaign including copy text, images, design colours, banners and call to actions. As there is no definitive right or wrong way to determine the best structure for your email marketing campaign, it is vital to put your emails to the test with your own database to find out how your target market responds to variations in these elements of your campaign. This can be done by A/B Split Testing.

What is A/B Split Testing?

A/B Split Testing is a method marketers use to analyse the effectiveness of changes made the elements mentioned above and involves creating two versions of the marketing material. Usually, version “A” is the original (commonly referred to as the champion) and version “B” is the alternate (commonly referred to as the challenger). Your database is then split to create two sample distribution lists of the same size. Version “A” is sent to one sample and version “B” is sent to the other sample. If the challenger proves more effective in achieving the desired outcome of the campaign, then the challenger replaces the champion and becomes the new champion to be tested.

When conducting A/B Split Testing it is important to only choose one element for testing in each split test. This will ensure accuracy when analysing results. For example, an event management company wants to test the effectiveness of an alternate “call to action” on a banner created for an event invitation email. The purpose of the “call to action” is to entice people to make a booking onto an event using a discount code provided. The original (champion) call to action states “Limited Time Offer: Use Code: SYM1”. The alternate (Challenger) call to action states “Offer Ends 31st January: Use Code SYM2”. All other elements of the email remain the same. The company then splits their targeted contacts database and sends version “A” to 2000 people and version “B” to 2000 people. When the discount code has expired, the company analyses the results and finds that 3% of the recipients used code SYM1 and booked onto the event (60 of the 2000 recipients) and 5% used code SYM2 (100 of the 2000 recipients). The challenger was proven the most effective “call to action”.

It is important to have a clear purpose or desired outcome of the element you are testing before A/B Split Testing any of your marketing material. In the example above, the purpose was for recipients to book onto the event using the discount code. However, if the purpose was to test which call to action would generate the most website visits, then the results could have been different. For example, the original version may have achieved a higher click through rate but, with no expiration date placed on the discount, did not entice people make a booking at that moment in time.

Many companies are using A/B Split Testing as a base for their marketing decisions. Companies with a large database can test more than two versions of an element in the same test by doing an A/B/C Split Test and including two alternate versions.


How Can I A/B Split Test My Email Invites Sent From Symphony?

Symphony’s powerful Campaign Email Management tools allow you to create invitation, follow up and post event email. Once you have

1.    Designed your email and customised it with your chosen banners, logos, images and text content.
2.    Export your contacts list from the central contacts database within your Symphony account, separate them into two samples of equal number and save as CSV files to your files area.
3.    Attach the first sample to your original (champion) email which will now be ready and waiting to be sent.
4.    Go back to the Campaign Email overview screen, click the “create new invite” button and select “copy from a previous campaign”.
5.    Select the original campaign and make alterations to the element to be tested.
6.    You can then go on to upload the second sample of contacts, send both versions of the invitation and wait for the delivery report to come in and analyse the results.