Creating a Campaign: Regular and A/B Test

Let’s start creating a campaign.

Go to Campaigns at the top of the screen. This is where all of your sent campaigns and saved email drafts can be found. You can hover over a previously sent campaign to duplicate it, or you can start a new campaign from scratch.

When you begin creating a campaign, you can choose to send either an A/B test campaign, or a regular campaign.

Now you’ll name the new email, give it a subject line, and a reply-to address. If you want to personalize the subject line, adding your subscriber’s first name, for example, we can do so using Campaign Monitor’s own template tags. Add a fall-back just in case you don’t have that subscriber’s first name.

When creating a campaign, you can improve your results and learn about your subscribers by using an A/B test.

An A/B test allows you to test two versions of a subject line, the from name, or email content to learn what your audience responds to. This is done by sending two separate versions of an email to a random group of subscribers in your list. After a period of time, the email results are compared and a winning version is selected. The winning version is then automatically sent to the remainder of your subscribers.

You can use A/B testing for any or all of your email campaigns. And in the case of subject line testing, you can set up an A/B test in moments.

When creating an A/B test, it’s important to consider both what kind of test you want to run, as well as your criteria for choosing the winning version.

Most commonly, Campaign Monitor customers choose to run an A/B test on two versions of the campaign’s subject line. If you want to test your subject line, we have a few recommendations.

• Choose two very different subject lines. Try to experiment by personalizing them with names or custom fields, or experiment with language and tone.
• You should select a winner based on the best open rate. This is the usual indicator of a subject line’s success.
• Ensure your A/B test includes 20% or more of your subscriber list, and
• Allow your test to run for as long as possible, especially if you have a global audience.

You can apply many of these best practices to A/B tests on email content and the from name. A/B testing email content in particular allows you to test two versions of CTAs, test an image versus a video, and even test message length.

By automatically selecting a winning email version based on clicks, you can dramatically improve email engagement.