Split testing is a powerful tool for marketers. It enables them to quantify the performance of elements within content against another element, by sending your audience two different versions of your campaign.
For instance, a marketing department for an automotive may want to understand how an email campaign banner which describes a new product model is performing. They could keep the original template (A) and test it against a template with a different
banner, or remove it completely (B).
When the campaign is ready for launch, it's important that the campaign manager picks the correct KPI's (Key Performance Indicators) that will inform them if A or B has the best performance.
Common KPI's for email campaigns include conversion rates, click through rates and social shares. More detail on this topic can be found at vtldesign.com/digital-marketing/16-marketing-kpis-to-measure which
comprehensively covers different campaign metrics.
The benefit of carrying out A/B split testing is that you can continuously optimise and improve your campaigns over time with actionable insights using reporting data.
Marketers no longer need to rely on guesswork on what they think audiences want to engage with as they have accurate data provided to them which tells them this already.
ClickDimensions for Microsoft Dynamics 365 provides a wonderful inbuilt A/B Split testing facility. This means you do not need to rely on configuring and testing 3rd party plugins, so you can focus on creating A/B Split testing
strategies out of the box.
How to start A/B Split testing with ClickDimensions
Firstly, let's begin by navigating to Dynamics 365 Marketing and clicking to the Email Sends view. You should see a list of drafted Email Sends, if not you will need to create a new one and attach an existing email template.
Once you are at this stage, you will see on your submenu an item displayed as "SPLIT TEST".
Once you have clicked this, a popup will appear allowing you to configure your A/B Split test parameters, enabling you to understand which elements, or entire templates perform the best against another.
The popup enables you to set variables for the subject, name, email address and record owner, before finally allowing you choose a different email template to test against.
Once you are happy with your configuration, click Next.
You will be confronted with the above view. This enables you to configure your test conditions. You can define which portion of your marketing list will receive the split test, as well as selecting the winning strategy which can be either Unique Click Rate or Unique Open Rate. Lastly,
you can select the duration of the split test, by choosing when a winner is picked.
You can also do this in the Email Sends view under Split Test Preferences, as shown below:
So you have configured your campaign, set up the split test and you have sent the email to your subscribers. Now you would like to see the results. You can do this by going to 'Email Statistics' at the top of your page, which should sit
next to your 'Split Results' icon which you on clicked earlier.
This will display how your campaign has performed and break down the two different variable templates.
Hopefully, this guide has been helpful to those just starting out with ClickDimensions. A/B Split testing is a powerful tool and considered a must-have in 2018. If you have any questions, please get in touch to speak to us.
