Campaign Variant Types

Creating campaign variants to test in Iterable can be a fun and creative process. It's where you surface the details you want to test to see what works, and what doesn't, and where you set yourself up to learn valuable insights about your users.

Planning an Experiment, provides information to help you choose which part of a message to experiment with, based on your experiment objective. This article highlights changes you might consider for the part of the message you chose.

# In this article

# From name and sender variants

When you receive a message, are you more likely to open it if you recognize the sender by a company name, or if it's from someone you know? Does receiving a message that reflects a recent transaction you've had with a company motivate you to open it? To find out if the same's true for your users, test from and sender name fields. You might try using:

• Your company name, to trigger brand recognition
• A brand catch phrase
• The name of a person customers engage with at your company (maybe an agent assigned to them)
• A transactional value (like, help@example.com)

# Subject line variants

It's generally best to test substantial changes, rather than small ones, when experimenting with subject lines. For example, you might:

• Lengthen or shorten the subject line
• Write a call to action
• Highlight a noteworthy new service, product, or feature
• Include a user-specific detail (maybe their first name)
• Add an emoji

# Preheader variants

When you're experimenting with preheader text, consider using only one or two key words, or a quick and recognizable phrase. Text that's catchy and doesn't repeat, but perhaps extends, your subject line has the best potential to impact open rates. Keep in mind that this text is often displayed in a font that's smaller or more faint than the subject line, and some monitors display a short bit of text, if any.

# Send time variants

In addition to the impact it has on conversions, sending messages to users when they're able to engage with them is a great way to make them feel like you respect them (and sending them at inopportune times has the opposite effect).

If you're not already leveraging Send Time Optimization to maximize opens and clicks, try experimenting with a couple different times to see which performs best. When choosing times, consider whether your target audience is more likely to pay attention to messages on weekdays (in the morning, on a lunch break, or after an evening commute) or on weekends (probably not too early).

See Send Time Optimization for more information.

# Message body variants

To measure the effectiveness of a campaign and its variants with clicks, purchases, or custom events, experiment with message body.

With message body experiments you can test big changes, such as to layout or new text or images, or more subtle changes, such as adjusting button or link positions.