To begin with:
1. Log in to your Autoklose account.
2. Click "Start a campaign".
3. You can choose and split blank template if you want to write your own content, or you can choose and split one of the predefined templates and then change them to suit your needs.
4. In step four (4) of starting your new campaign "Customize E-mail Sequence", you will have the "+ A/B test" option below the text editor.
5. If you choose to create an A/B test email, after you click the + A/B test button, the editor will split it into two windows:
Blank subject/body window - If you don’t create a copy before you click the + A/B test button
Duplicated subject/body window - If you’ve created the subject/body content before you click the + A/B test button
6. You can add two types of email templates and change the subject line and the email body during any step and then run both combinations at the same time.
7. An A/B test email can be either initial or follow-up.
Although you can always make changes within active campaigns, we strongly advise against doing so. Pay special attention while creating an A/ B test campaign, so that you can determine for sure which variable worked best.
Also, deleting one variant of A/B testing is possible if you don’t want to conduct an A/B test, or you have made too many changes to the initial copy and want to easily reverse that.
How are A/B test emails sent to recipients?
Contacts in your campaign will be split as evenly as possible, and then each variant will be sent to approximately 50% of recipients.
The system chooses who gets which variant randomly; for example, if you have a list of 100 contacts in your campaign, the system will automatically send the version A to 50 and version B to the other 50 contacts. This will only work if you add your recipients in batches, as for a single contact, the variant will always be A.
Email steps are split up randomly and each step is randomized independently from each other, so if the Step1 variant was A, it doesn't mean that the same contact gets the A variant in the following steps as well.
Since A/B testing is random, you won't know who receives which template variant upfront. You will be able to see who received which email only after both emails have been sent.
Our recommendation is to add a short list of people for testing templates. 100 to 200 people is a
large enough test sample.
How is the winner email chosen?
The winner email will be automatically chosen after 30 days based on the email performance, or you can manually change the number of days you want your test campaign to run before the winner email is chosen.
The most important statistic that affects the process of choosing the winner email is the number of replies;
the second most important one is the number of clicks;
the number of opens comes last in the order of importance.
You will get a detailed email report about the performance of each variant, and also the system will mark the winner email.
Please note that once your campaign is finished and the winner email is chosen, if a recipient performs an action afterward, that can alter the results of your statistics but won’t change the winner email.
Once the winner email is chosen, your campaign will continue to send that version if a new batch of recipients is added to the campaign.
You can change the winner email manually in case you don’t want to send that version of the email and want to send another version instead.
How can A/B test emails be edited and saved?
Even after your A/B test campaign is finished, you can further edit and customize both versions - the “winner” and “looser” email.
The A/B test sequence can be saved as a template and re-used later
Please note that you can only save both version A and version B to templates, and it is not yet possible to save just the winner email - the winner email can be saved and used further only within the A/B test campaign.
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To learn more about A/B testing click here.