Before you begin to run direct mail or email testing, you should follow these steps to make sure you have a clean A/B test. You’ll want your test lists to be as even as possible in terms of valid addresses and demographic information. Consider the following steps before splitting your list.
- Remove inactive and highly active names to split separately.
- Sort to ensure important fields are split evenly (e.g. key code within zip)
- Assign different keys to the final splits (e.g. an ‘A’ or ‘B’ suffix)
- Double-check the accuracy of the split with pre-split and post-split counts
Now you can merge your A and B lists back together with confidence that they are even splits.