Manage Omnichannel Split Testing across Facebook and SFMC

A good marketer treats marketing as a game of experimentation. It’s easy to set up a campaign, watch how it performs, then repeat again and again. But how will this help you improve conversions in the long run? Ideally, you want to test different campaign strategies to continuously improve performance.

Some of the most popular elements to test in campaigns are:

• Ad headers or email subject lines
• Body copy
• Call to action(s)
• Imagery

While some marketing platforms like Facebook Ads or Salesforce CRM allow for multivariate testing within their specific channel(s), marketers today lack the ability to easily create randomized audiences that sync across their many marketing tools. Doing so would allow them to not only focus on multivariate testing on one channel - but coordinating these efforts across many.

Sure, you can manually download an audience list and split it into testing groups with RANDOM() formulas in excel before re-uploading multiple CSVs to each unique platform–but that takes time and effort that modern marketing teams don’t seem to have.

Using Hightouch, you create your desired audience with our no-code audience builder (using the customer data already in your data warehouse). Then, you define your testing splits within your audience, along with the percentage of users allocated to each. From there, Hightouch takes away the hassle of splitting lists and returns to you exactly what you wanted - randomized groups of users to sync out to any of your marketing tools to leverage for your multivariate testing across channels.

Let’s say you’re on the marketing team of a quick-service restaurant and want to try experimenting with your marketing channel mix and messaging. Your current Facebook ads alone have had some success, but you want to see if following up with an email campaign will drive even more customers.

To take this a step further, you want to test how personalization performs in your email. To run the test, you know you need three randomly distributed audiences of users:

• Users who ARE targeted on Facebook and ARE NOT sent an email (This is your control group)
• Users who ARE targeted on Facebook and ARE sent an email WITHOUT personalization (This is Test A)
• Users who ARE targeted on Facebook and ARE sent an email WITH personalization (This is Test B)

Using Hightouch, you can create your initial audience: people who have ordered something within the last month. Then, you can create your testing splits; Control, Test A, and Test B.

• The control group will only be shown Facebook retargeting ads
• Test A will be sent a generic email with no personalization
• Test B will be sent a personalized email, one tailored to what they ordered last time

You can send the same audience to multiple destinations with Hightouch Audience. Those flagged as Test A and Test B will be used in Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) and sent a personalized email or not, depending on what group they are in.

To monitor performance, Hightouch sends the audience information back to your data warehouse (using sync logs) so that your analytics team can measure how successful the campaign was.

Please note that you will need the audiences feature enabled in Hightouch. To enable audiences, please request a demo here or reach out to our sales team.

1. Select from our supported source types and click Continue.

   

2. Enter your source configuration details and click Continue.

   

3. Name your source and click Finish.

   

1. Navigate to destinations and click Add Destination. Select Facebook Custom Audiences and click Continue.

   

2. Connect to Facebook with 0Auth. This will open up a new window to input your credentials. Once done, click Continue.

   

3. Name the destination and click Finish.

   

1. Navigate back to destinations and click Add Destination. Select Salesforce Marketing Cloud and click Continue.

   

2. Enter your Salesforce Marketing Cloud details and click Continue.

   

3. Name the destination and click Finish.

   

1. Navigate to Audiences and click Add audience. From here select your customer data object and click Continue.

   
   

2. Build your Audience. Click Add Condition and select Have a Property. In this scenario, we're building an audience of users who have purchased at least one time within a month.

   
   

3. Click Preview results to better understand your audience composition and click Continue to name and save your audience.

   
   
   

1. Click on the Audience you created, Click on Splits and enable it.

   

2. Name your splits and set their percentages then click Save.

   

1. With your audience built, it's time to create your sync to Facebook and Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Click on the audience you've created. From there navigate to Syncs and click Add sync.

   
   

2. Select the Facebook Audiences destination that you set up and choose which columns you want to sync to Facebook. If you're dealing with PII data you can configure Hightouch automatically hash your data.

   
   

3. After you've mapped your columns you can set your sync schedule and click Finish.

   

4. With the Facebook Custom Audience sync complete, it’s time to set up the Salesforce Marketing Cloud sync. Follow the same steps above to create a sync to Salesforce Marketing Cloud, except this time select Salesforce Marketing Cloud as your destination.

   

5. Next, configure your settings and choose how you want your data synced to Salesforce and define how your records should be updated. After this, you simply need to select a primary key and choose which columns you want to sync to Salesforce.

   
   
   

6. After you've mapped your columns you can set your sync schedule and click Finish.

   

7. After clicking run, your audience will be available in both Salesforce and Facebook so you can run experiments.

Pro Tip: You can use sync logs to ensure that the data that identifies which audience split each user belongs to is available in your data warehouse. This allows your team to quickly and easily look into the performance by audience split to determine the champion experience.

Continuous multivariate testing is a non-negotiable for modern marketers. Doing so ensures that the team is consistently driving learnings to maximize performance across their many marketing channels.

These modern marketing teams turn to Hightouch to ensure that their audiencing needs are met–building and syncing the randomized audiences needed to support their various testing needs.

Want to learn more about Hightouch Audiences? Check out our other playbooks or book a demo with our team of experts today!