A/B Testing With Avon

A big part of my role as an account manager is to look for opportunities to grow my client’s business. When reviewing Avon’s email marketing program, we noticed that their engagement rates were below the industry standard. This became an opportunity to introduce Avon to new product features that would result in higher customer engagement.

One of the things I noticed when setting up their promo mailings was that they were not using any dynamic content within their ad hoc promo setups. I identified that this could be used as an opportunity to increase their campaign’s engagement rates. During one of our status calls, I brought this to their attention. While Avon did not doubt that having dynamic content implemented into their promo campaigns would yield better engagement, their main concern was whether the additional sales they would receive from dynamic content would be worth the additional hours used to set up those pieces. As a result we decided to test their concern. We synched up with our strategic services team and performed an A/B test in order to test out Avon’s hypothesis. Usually, Avon promos had a flat percentile discount off of any purchases over a certain amount of money spent. Or X% off of a particular item. We made the suggestion of providing discounts to products that are most relevant to each user and see if the relevancy of the product would result in higher engagement which would lead to higher sales.

The Test

The test was simple:

Compare the return on investment vs hours spent between campaigns with and without dynamic content.

Avon had a “preferred product category” field existing in their database which ranks all user’s most preferred product type based on purchase history and page visits. For the sake of testing, we only tested two of the most popular product categories: makeup and skincare. The tests were set up as follows:

graphics by Iconbros

The REsults

We ran this test for a month. Once testing was completed, we conclusively reported, these campaigns dynamic campaigns net a 12% increase in click through rates compared to the generic discount banners they have offered. We didn’t have visibility on their exact return on investment but Avon was very pleased with these results. They began implementing dynamic content in many of their future promotional ad-hoc emails. In addition to that, they began approaching our strategic services for other testing opportunities such as subject line testing, time-of-day testing, and frequency testing.