Are your campaigns lying? Control groups reveal the truth
Every day, you flood your customers with emails, push notifications, and text messages. Everything looks good in terms of opens and conversions. But is this growth your success, or would your customers have done the same anyway?
Honestly, without a control group, your effectiveness data is largely fiction. You are measuring information noise, not real impact.
What is a control group?
It’s a simple mechanism – a segment of your database that you deliberately cut off from a given campaign. It’s your litmus test. By comparing its results with those of the group that received the message, you will finally find out how much your campaign actually earned. No more guessing: it’s time for facts.
How does it work in practice?
Let’s not theorize. Let’s look at a specific example.
Scenario: You want to send a campaign with a 15% discount code to customers who haven’t bought anything in 90 days.
The standard approach? Send it to everyone. The smart approach?
- You create a segment: You build a segment of customers who meet the criterion of “no purchase in 90 days.”
- You check one box: When creating the segment, you select the “Control group” option = YES. The system automatically and randomly places 10% of the recipients from this segment in it.
- You are creating a new campaign, whether it is an email or SMS: Launch the campaign. 90% of “dormant customers” receive the code. 10% (control group) receive NOTHING. After a week, check the revenue from both groups.
Conclusion: If the group that received the code generated (after scaling) PLN 10,000 more than the control group – congratulations. This is a real, quantifiable, and indisputable profit from your campaign. And if the difference is marginal? Now you know that your discount is an unnecessary cost that did not encourage anyone to make a purchase anyway. This knowledge is invaluable.
Just remember that the total number of contacts in all control group segments cannot exceed 30% of the database.
Where to use control groups?
Control groups are not just a tool for emails. Use them to find out the truth about the effectiveness of almost any channel:
- Email, SMS, Voice: Do your messages really sell?
- Web Push, Mobile Push: Do notifications generate traffic or just annoyance?
- In-App, On-Site: Do your personalized banners and actions on the website actually work, or are they just background noise?
Secure management
You won’t accidentally destroy your data. The system won’t let you delete a control group if it’s being used in an active campaign or its draft copy. It’s a simple safeguard that protects the integrity of your experiments. Want to clean up? Deactivate the related campaigns first.
Summary
Most marketers prefer to live in a comfortable world of apparent success and inflated statistics.
The question is: do you want to make decisions that really drive your business? Creating your first control group takes 5 minutes. The results you get may be uncomfortable. But they will be real.
Fill out the brief and keep every campaign under control.
