How to create an email marketing campaign with A/B testing

If you own your own online store or have ever created an email marketing campaign, you have surely heard of (also known as A/B testing in English) and how they can help you better understand user behavior. to create more efficient campaigns.

In this article we want to teach you how to create an A/B test within , an email marketing tool (it’s in English but it’s very easy to use).

To start your first A/B test for email marketing, you first have to make the functionality free for free. In case you have a paid plan, access to it will be available from the first day.

What is A/B testing?

A/B testing allows you to send two different versions of the same email to a segment of your contact list. The objective is to identify the version that has the best results (opening of emails, entering links, etc.) and thus send it to the rest of the subscribers to the list.

What can I try?

For an email marketing campaign, you can test the opening rates and income to your links within an email based on the following variables:

• Subject: Try small or large variations in the subject of the message, from a more personal tone to something more formal. You can also vary promotional calls, such as ‘15% discount’ or ‘free shipping’.
• Emissary: ​​from whom is the email sent? You can test if your customers find more affinity with a company email or with the name of a person.
• Sending date and time: try different times and days to discover the one that generates the most interaction from your customers.
• Content: try images, , different designs or style of the message. Customize it in different ways and see which one works best.

When running an A/B test, try to make changes slowly and individually so you can more accurately analyze the results later. If you change everything together, you won’t know what positively impacted your open and click rates.

For this practice there are some tips, for example: when testing the content of an email, choose the message that received the highest number of clicks instead of the one that received the highest opening rate. Why? Because the person who opens an email is not always interested in its content, but the person who enters one of the links is. This way you will be targeting the most relevant users for your business.

How to create an A/B test for email marketing in MailChimp

1. Go to the campaigns page (Campaigns)
2. Click Create campaign > A/B Split campaign
   
3. Select the option you want to test under What would you like to test?
4. In case you choose to test the subject of the email (Subject lines) or the name that appears as the sender (From names), you must specify the percentage of users that will be included in the test where it says ‘How should we split the campaign’. Of that segment of the list that you choose (say, 34%) half will receive version A of the message, and the other half will receive version B. The remaining segment of the list (continuing with the example, 66%) will receive the ‘winning’ version of the cookware.
5. Tip: Try a small segment of your database (between 20 and 40%). In this way you avoid compromising many users in a test that precisely serves to send a successful message to as many users as possible. In “How should a winner be chosen? ” you must choose the parameter that will define the winner of the test; which can be ‘open rate’, ‘click rate’ or ‘manual’; and the time after which a winner will be defined and the message will be sent to the remaining segment (the longer the test time, the more significant the sample).
6. Choose the recipient list or list segment you want your emails to receive.
7. Determine the campaign parameters: email subject, from names and tracking tags (in the case of content campaigns). If you are going to test the subject (subject lines), you can do it from Email subject.
8. If you decide to test the name of the sender (From names), you can choose both the sending email and the name that will appear as ‘who sent the message’.
   
   
9. I chose one of the available templates.
10. In the next step you can customize the design of the campaign. Remember that the same content will apply to both versions of the email, unless what you want to test is the content itself (topic for a future post).
11. Review all the steps you have taken so far. If what you are testing is the subject text (Subject lines) and the name of the sender (From names), you can send the email directly from Send now or schedule it to be sent in the near future. If what you are testing is the day and time of delivery (Delivery data/time), you will have to click on Schedule and choose the date before clicking on Schedule campaign.

I manually chose the winning version

If in step 3 above you selected the option “Manual within How should a winner be chosen?”, you will have to return to Mailchimp after 1 or 2 days to see the test report and manually select the winning version to finally fire the message to the list.

You can see the report from Reports > A/B split results.

The winning version of the message (A or B) will be sent after the period of time you set. For example, if you chose a period of one day, your campaign will be sent one day after the winning message has been determined.

Synthesis

In this article we explain how to test the text of the subject of your emails, the day and time of sending and the name of the sender of the message. With a complete tool like Mailchimp it is possible perform an A/B test on your email marketing campaigns without complications.

If not yet, you can try the Tiendanube platform for free for 30 days. Cheer up!