A/B test your campaigns
Crafting the perfect campaign can be challenging. Klaviyo's A/B testing feature simplifies how to test your subject line, content, and send times, helping you make data-driven decisions to improve your campaigns. An A/B test allows you to compare 2 or more content variations to understand what leads to the highest engagement.
A/B testing your campaigns provides insight into:
- What content resonates best with your audience.
- Which send times lead to high engagement.
In this lesson, we'll look at how to create an A/B test for email campaigns and also offer a few strategies for testing a text message campaign. When you create an email campaign, you'll notice an option to Create A/B test. Let's walk through how to create a test based on the metrics you want to improve, configure your settings, and analyze your results.
Have a clear goal in mind
First, write down a goal for A/B testing your campaigns. What is the main metric you want to see improve? Do you have a new strategy you’d like to try out before sharing with your full audience?
When testing an email campaign focus on the metrics you can improve:
- Open rates
- Click rates
- Placed order rates
Open rates do not apply for text messages. Instead, you can focus on:
- Click rates
- Placed order rates
Test content or send times
Next, based on the metric you want to improve, decide what to test. Identify which variable (e.g., subject line, call-to-action, incentive) contributes to the improved performance you’re hoping to see, and use that as the basis for your test.
What to test for email:
- Open rates: Test your subject line, preview text, campaign name, or send time to understand why subscribers open your email.
- Click rates: Test your CTA, template layout and content, or images to see what motivates recipients to click on links in your message.
- Placed order rates: Test your CTA and send time, or add reviews to see what drives recipients to place orders.
What to test for text message:
- Click rates: Test your CTA, length of copy, or whether adding images/GIFs (i.e., making it an MMS) affects whether or not the recipient clicks.
- Placed order rates: Test your CTA and send time to see what drives recipients to place orders.
Let's say you want to test the subject line of your emails to improve open rates. You'll create 2 variations of your subject line and label each variation with a distinct name to see which one gets more engagement. Create 1 subject line with an emoji and 1 without to see which style your audience prefers.
Adjust an A/B test's settings
After creating your content, you can adjust the size of your testing pool and the length of your testing period:
- Choose the test's winning metric based on the metric you want to improve (e.g., open rate, click rate, or placed order rate).
- What percentage of people receive each variation (we recommend a test size of 100% based on your list size).
- The test duration based on the A/B test metric.
Once a winning variation is selected, that message is sent to the rest of the audience. If you manually select a winner, anyone who hasn't yet received the campaign will receive the winning variation immediately.
Review A/B test results
Navigate to the campaign you are testing to view its progress and see which version has performed better. If you'd like to end an ongoing A/B test:
- Navigate to the A/B Test Results tab of an ongoing campaign.
- Click the additional options menu next to the version you'd like to choose.
- Click Choose as Winner.
If the results show that a subject line with emojis performs better, you can adjust your marketing strategy. If open rates remain low, you can create a new test to try out variations of the preview text or send times.