One of the greatest success factors within CRM is to perform tests and base your work on insights. Therefor, we recommend you to use control groups to analyze the outcome of your work—every single time.

There are two types of control groups in Engage: traditional control groups used to follow up specific campaigns, and Master control groups used to measure your CRM work over time. In this article, we will go through them both.

Control groups

A control group is a randomly selected group (%) of contacts from your original recipient group that won't receive the message you're about to send out. The purpose is to measure the effect of your communication by comparing the conversion between those who did receive the message with those who didn't.

Engage calculates the effect by analyzing if your recipients make a purchase but doesn't take into consideration what kind of products they buy. This is because your communication can trigger recipients to make a purchase, but they might not buy the products you promote in your message.

After the message has been sent, Engage will start collecting data and presenting sales statistics for your recipients in comparison to the contacts in your control group. Wait a couple of days before analyzing the effect of your message. Be patient and give your recipients a reasonable amount of time to shop before you draw any conclusions.

The size of your control group will have a big impact on the effect measurement. Our number one tip is: don't work with too small groups. Small groups are more likely to result in extreme outcomes and a few large purchases can have a drastic impact on the calculation and will not reflect the truth. Our recommendation is that the control group constitutes 10 % of the recipients, or at the most 5,000 email addresses/phone numbers. However, if you don’t reach a statistically significant result, increasing the number of contacts could help. It all comes down to your customers’ purchase behavior.

Setting up control groups

You get to set up your control group in the last step of creating your email. Click the Create Control group for this message box and decide on how big group you want to exclude from your email send-out.

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Analyzing the effect

As mentioned above, your control group can be used as a reference group to measure the effect of your message. You can compare effect data for:

  1. Anyone that received the message vs. The control group (SMS + email)
  2. Anyone that has opened the message vs. The control group (email)
  3. Anyone that has clicked on a link in the message vs. The control group (email)

You can filter data based on time (1–6 days/1–4 weeks/1 month) and choose if you want to compare all sales, sales in physical stores or online sales.

KPI Main group Control group
Number of contacts Total number of contacts that received the message Total number of contacts in the control group
Made a purchase

Total number of contacts that made at least one purchase/return during the selected time (a.k.a respondents)

Total number of contacts that made at least one purchase/return during the selected time (a.k.a respondents)

Conversion rate

The percentage of recipients that made at least one purchase/return during the selected time (Respondents/Total number of contacts)

The percentage of contacts in the control group that made at least one purchase/return during the selected time (Respondents/Total number of contacts)

Purchases per converted customer

The average number of receipts for recipients that made a purchase/return during the selected time (Total number of receipts/Respondents)

The average number of receipts for contacts in the control group that made a purchase/return during the selected time (Total number of receipts/Respondents)

Average receipt

The average receipt sum for recipients that made a purchase/return during the selected time, in your currency (Total sales/Total number of purchases)

The average receipt sum for contacts in the control group that
made a purchase/return during the selected time, in your currency (Total sales/Total number of purchases)

Total sales The recipient group's total purchase sum, minus returns, during the selected time, in your currency The control group's total purchase sum, minus returns, during the selected time, in your currency

If the result is considered statistically significant (has at least a 90 % probability), you will be presented with an estimate of how much money your message has generated in comparison to if it hadn't been sent out at all. Engage will extrapolate the results for your control group to be able to compare the total sales figures between the two groups.

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You can easily find contacts that where included in a control group for a specific email or SMS message using the segmentation criteria "In control group for message ..." with the option "Sent/Draft/Scheduled".

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