Everyone tells us that using Graphicmail is as easy as ABC – well here’s another slant on that …… it’s called A / B testing. It’s here to help remove most of the guesswork out of “What to say, what to send “ and to get you some feedback BEFORE you send – how’s that for a great feature ??
Before A / B testing you had to send out your mailing, then check your reports & statistics in order to analyse how the opens/ click throughs compared with previous sends so you could work at improving your next mailout. After all, your newsletters are all designed using a similar template layout aren’t they? Well you now have a friend in Graphicmail = the split test feature
A/B split testing has been developed to help you to assess which strategies and techniques work best for your email marketing campaigns, which, roughly translated, means that you can now test what your subscribers like best.
It works like this; you draw up different variations of your newsletter, then you send each of these different newsletters to separate percentages of your contacts. This allows you to see how each of those percentages reacted to the different newsletters. You can then select the one that worked the best and send that particular newsletter to the remaining subscribers in that list.
So, A/B split testing gives you two options: The first one allows you to select 5 newsletters to compare – maybe they have the same content, but each having a different image or subtle changes in the layout/design or content. (You don’t need 5 different newsletters in fact, you can just do a couple if you prefer.) You can, as an alternative, test up to 5 different subject lines for the same newsletter – using different tones or varying the length.
So, if you choose to send the test to 10 % of your mailing list and you want to compare 2 newsletters, then 5 % will receive Newsletter-A and 5 % will receive Newsletter-B. When you’ve checked which one was most effective/successful, that’s when you send the ‘winning’ newsletter to the remaining 90% of your mailing list and, as the system keeps note of those who received which version of the test, nobody receives your newsletter twice!
Wondering how to assess which one worked the best?
It’s really easy, and it’s also your choice! You decide what is most important to you and to your business: You just check how many recipients clicked to open your newsletter, or how many clicked the link to your website. The A/B split test automatically assesses according to your settings and you receive a report showing the statistics and the status of your send.
There are no restrictions, you can use A/B split testing as often as you like, in fact, the more you use it to test and improve, the better will be the results of your campaigns, increasing the likelihood that you will stay on top of subscriber trends. The more, the merrier!