Email Marketing by the Numbers: How to Use the World’s Greatest Marketing Tool to Take Any Organization to the Next Level

Multivariate Testing

If you aren’t testing at all, need a quick answer, or want to upgrade your email to another level, multivariate testing is absolutely the way to go. You can still do A/B testing if you so choose—perhaps run a multivariate test every few months and use A/B testing on every other email.

Although multivariate testing may seem a little more complex at first glance, it is still very easy to execute. You are essentially following the same steps that you use for A/B testing, but you will have more segments and variables. I’ll use ExactTarget as an example here.

Like many companies that deliver an ongoing communication, we ran into a situation where a high number of our recipients were no longer actively engaging with our email. The marketing team decided it was time to reengage our readers. This wasn’t going to be an easy task, but developing a more responsive e-communication base would be worth the effort. We were in the process of migrating to a new and improved communication, so the timing was perfect to introduce subscribers to the email while asking them to define new preference options.

To ensure that we were getting the most out of our reengagement campaign efforts, we first performed a multivariate test. If we were going to take on a task of this magnitude, why not make sure we were sending the most effective campaign possible? There were numerous elements of the proposed email that could have a potential impact on its performance.

We decided to conduct tests ...