Revamped eDialog Platform Enables A/B Split Tests

E-mail service provider eDialog announced a major overhaul of its campaign management technology, including a new feature that allows marketers to A/B split test small portions of their files and roll out the winner.

According to Art Souza, eDialog’s director of product management, the company’s engineers spent the last year revamping its campaign management platform.  The overhauled platform has been dubbed Precision Central version 7.0.

“It was a complete overhaul of the toolset,” he said.

Also, according to Souza, the most important addition to Precision Central is one that enables marketers to send multiple split tests to small segments of their house files and roll the winning campaign out to the rest of their databases.

Though A/B split tests—where one element of a campaign is changed in two or more test mailings to see which offers the most lift in response—are a staple of traditional direct mail marketing, they have not been universally embraced in e-mail marketing.

E-mail is so cheap to send, it doesn’t create the financial pressure to test the way direct mail does.

However, as e-mail has evolved, other factors have surfaced creating an increasing need for e-mail marketers to test campaign elements—ISPs’ reliance on spam complaints to determine whose mail to block, for one example.

Even e-mail to permission-based lists can draw enough complaints to get a mailer’s messages blocked if it irritates enough people. Moreover, mailing too frequently can draw spam complaints, as well.

And with increasing clutter in people’s inboxes driving click-through rates down, it is becoming apparent that people are tuning e-mail out.

As a result, e-mail marketers who haven’t already begun A/B split testing need to begin to do so they can send more relevant—and possibly even fewer—messages.

According to Souza, one reason e-mail marketers have yet to embrace A/B split testing en-masse is because it is difficult to do.

“It’s something we used to do on a project basis for clients,” he said. “Now we’ve taken all the complexity out of it and turned it into something the non-technical marketing manager can use.”

Another significant upgrade to eDialog’s technology, according to Souza, is a revamped dashboard that allows marketers run simple reports that even managers who aren’t familiar with e-mail’s complexities can understand.

“This is a graphical view-at-a-glance of the health of all your e-mail campaigns,” he said. “This can be set up so that when you log into Precision Central, the first thing you see is your dashboard. … And somebody who is not doing the day-to-day e-mail marketing can log into the system and see the health of the e-mail marketing group.”

According to eDialog, Precision Central 7.0 is available to clients immediately.