A/B testing is a great way to see what subject lines, from lines, photos, layouts, and more actually work to get people to click and take action. With Automatic A/B Testing, you can choose the key statistic you want to use to measure an email's success and automatically send out the best performing email to the rest of your audience.
To use this feature, you'll need to test a certain part of your email (subject lines, from lines, photos, etc.). You can add additional subject and from lines by clicking the green + arrow in the Edit Email page. You can add additional bodies by clicking the +Add Alternate Body link below the first body of your email. You can test these all at once if you like. Action Network will create a version for every combination, so two subjects and two from lines creates four email versions.
Next, you can move on to targeting your email. Set whatever criteria you'd like to use for this email. In the Random Limit section, add the number of random people from the audience you're targeting that should receive these tests. You can learn more about random limits here. Continue on to the Save, Preview, and Send page.
On the Save, Preview, and Send page you'll see the option to Automate A/B testing. When you click this, you'll be able to choose the key statistic (such as opens, clicks, etc…) you want to use to measure an email's success. The version with the highest key statistic will be automatically sent to the rest of the targeted universe, which is done by removing the random limit and excluding the test email from the winning email’s audience. You can set an amount of time in hours after which the messages will be evaluated and a winner will be sent.
In the next section, you can set conditions for the circuit breaker. This will stop a winning message from being sent if the conditions are met. For example, you can stop a test from continuing if the unsubscribe rate on the winning version is too high.
Once you've set the key statistics and added circuit breaker conditions, you can schedule this email to go out at any point in the future or send it out right away. After the number of hours you set after sending, Action Network will automatically evaluate which test performed the best using the key statistic you set. If the circuit breaker was not triggered, we will automatically choose the best performing email as the winner and send it out to the rest of your list, removing the random limit and excluding the test email.