Email campaigns within PublicInput are able to be A/B tested for effectiveness. A/B testing of an email campaign allows for two different versions of an email - version A and version B - to be tested to see how small changes have an impact on results. While creating an email campaign, it is possible to set this up and optimize the performance of your outreach. Here's how:
First, create your email campaign but don't send it just yet: We'll next need to create the "B" version of our email for the A/B test. From the "Email" tab on the campaign, click the three dots aka "meatball" icon on the right side of the page and click "Edit A/B Test Settings".
This opens a modal where you're able to select the options for A/B testing. You're able to test the email subject, sender, preview text, content, and send time. You can also manually select the percentage of the recipients to receive email "B" vs email "A". It's usually good practice to keep this 50/50.
In this case, we'll keep things simple and test the subject and content - selecting those two check boxes and clicking "Create A/B Test".
This re-opens the Email Campaign screen, now with editing tabs for both "Email Version A" and "Email Version B". It is on these tabs where we'll edit the test items for each email: In this case - as we selected in the prior step - the subject and content.
Clicking "Email Version A" opens the original email we created with no changes. "Email Version B" is where we'll be making our updates to test. Within this tab, notice that we're only able to edit the items we selected to test. In this case, we'll making some changes to the content and the subject:
Once those changes have been made, click "Save All Changes" to save the "B" version of your email. You can always go back and edit either version "A" or version "B" of the email prior to sending the campaign.
When the two emails are designed, set, and ready-to-go, add your email recipients (if you have not already) and head to the "Preview & Send" tab to send both versions of your email (or schedule them for the future if you prefer).
When the email is sent, PublicInput will handle the distribution and delivery to the included list of email addresses. In our "Create A/B Test" modal step above, we specified the percentage of recipients to receive version "B", and our system will do its best to adhere to this selection. Under the "Send A and B Now" button, you can see how many subscribers will receive each version of the email.
Once the campaign has been sent, you're able to see the results of both "A" and "B" from the "Sent Email Results" tab of the campaign. This view shows you how the emails performed side-by-side, so in the future you can improve the metrics about which you care.
