Multivariate tests play a crucial role in enhancing email marketing performance. It will identify the factors contributing to increased open rates, click rates, signups, conversion rates, and sales. In this article, let’s find out how multivariate testing work and differentiate them from A/B testing. We’ll also explain the benefits of using multivariate tests and identify an email marketing platform that offers these features.
What is multivariate testing?
Multivariate testing means using multiple elements to test your email campaign. Many elements are involved in email marketing success, such as email design, content, subject line, preview text, CTAs, sender name, sending time, and more. Multivariate testing features enable you to test all the factors of email marketing simultaneously. You can add 3-4 elements to optimize your email campaign.
With multivariate tests, you can attain higher conversion rates by testing various elements. Also, you can identify the most effective elements for your campaign.
Benefits of using multivariate tests
- Maximize open rates
- Improve conversion rates
- Optimize email subject lines and content
- Helps you identify the right time to send emails
- Assist in placing the perfect CTA to increase click-through rates
- Experience the difference by using various sender names
- Optimize preview text to increase engagement rates
- Test your email designs and choose the best-performing one
How are multivariate tests different from A/B testing?
Once you send an email, you cannot undo or change the subject line and content. Once your email is sent, you cannot retract it. Therefore, you need to test and analyze the data to create a perfect campaign. Simply changing the subject line does not guarantee an increase in campaign response.
Usually, A/B testing allows you to change subject lines and content. However, you cannot test the send time and sender name simultaneously. In A/B testing, you can only evaluate the impact of the subject line and content on your campaign response. Other elements of email marketing, such as sender name, CTA, and sending time, cannot be tested simultaneously in A/B testing.
Whereas multivariate testing offers you more combinations to test your email campaign for better performance. You can be confident about which elements contributed to increasing your email marketing performance. This leads to conducting highly efficient and effective email campaigns, resulting in more conversions and sales.
How do multivariate tests work in email marketing?
Setting up multivariate tests is extremely simple. But you should have featured it in your email marketing software. In MailerLite you will get multivariate test features to optimize your campaign results.
Here are the steps to set multivariate tests in MailerLite
#Step 1: Log in to MailerLite and start creating a new campaign.
#Step 2: Select multivariate testing, then choose the elements you want to test, such as subject line, sender’s name, email content, and sending time.
#Step 3: MailerLite’s AI capability automatically generates all possible variations of the email. For example, if you want to test 2 subject lines and 2 versions of email content, MailerLite will generate 4 combinations of emails.
#Step 4: Select the target audience you want to send the emails to and decide on the criteria for selecting the winner. Usually, open and click rates are used as parameters to decide which version of the email to send to the rest of your audience.
#Step 5: Once all steps of the campaign are set, review them and then send the campaign immediately or schedule it for later.
MailerLite then processes the campaign according to your instructions and provides you with exceptional results.
Email marketing platform with multivariate testing features
There are only a few email marketing platforms that provide multivariate testing. Some of them are
