Increase Message Engagement With A/B Testing

Have you heard we launched the new Advanced Package for the Communications Cloud recently? Within the Communications Cloud, the enhanced functionality includes pre-built campaigns, segmentation, and A/B testing — an area we will explore in depth today.

You know those meetings, where your team is endlessly debating communications strategy, trying to ensure you have the right message that will resonate with your audience. Why not let the data tell you?

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. With the GovDelivery Advanced Package for the Communications Cloud, we’ve introduced a streamlined approach to A/B testing. With 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 this streamlined approach, you can view real-time test results for on the spot optimizations or view changes in engagement over time to inform long-term strategy.

Real-time Testing: Do you have a major one-time campaign and need to maximize awareness and action? Run a real-time test to a small sub-set 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.

Long-term Strategy Testing: Want to glean high-level insights over time? Use the long-term testing to find trends by comparing two variables head to head on segments of your audience over time.  Leverage A/B test reports in addition to other performance metrics to make data-driven decisions about your long-term strategy.

No matter what approach you want to take, data collected within the testing period can be used to determine the campaign’s winning combination automatically or manually. Nonetheless, you can find the right message so your campaigns have optimal performance and engagement.

In Summary

While there are many ways to conduct A/B testing, there are few that offer a streamlined, proven approach to testing that’s already built into your campaign workflow.

Through GovDelivery, connecting with citizens – when and how they prefer – is the key to driving interest, awareness, engagement, and action. A/B testing and improved targeting capabilities drive the customer experience for local, state, and federal government organizations through the ability to make informed decisions through data.

Turn “I think” to “I know”… Learn more now.