Intro to A/B Testing: Increase Digital Engagement

Do you ever wonder if your message is the strongest it could be?

Data is a communicator’s best friend. It allows greater visibility into how well your message impacts your target audience. It helps answer who cares about your messages, what topics interest your subscribers, what techniques are most effective in generating a response, and most importantly, what elements of your communications strategy drive the most engagement.

While data can be used for measuring success, one of the strongest benefits it has is the ability to test the effectiveness of your communications. Enter A/B testing. A/B testing is a randomized science experiment of sorts where you compare two variables for the optimal impact. A/B testing cuts out the strategy debate and makes testing your ideas quick and easy.

Testing uses data to maximize the number of people who view, engage, and take action on your communications. GovDelivery offers a streamlined approach to A/B testing. With this advanced A/B testing, automatically or manually test multiple variations of your messages and determine a winner based on audience response.

Advanced A/B testing allows for side-by-side comparisons so you can better optimize your content and maximize impact. With A/B testing, you can test many variables to see which resonates best with your audience, including:

• Subject lines
• Message content
• Images/video
• Message length
• Format (templates)
• Landing pages
• Call-to-action buttons

Testing Explained: With A/B testing, you can view real-time test results for on the spot optimizations (Test & Send) or view changes in engagement over time to inform long-term strategy.

Try a Smaller Test First: Do you have a major one-time campaign and need to maximize awareness and action? Run a real-time test to a small subset of your audience and trigger the winning campaign within a set amount of time to the remainder of your audience. It’s a configurable 10/10/80 ratio ideal for on-the-spot optimization.