Overview

Marketers often face the dilemma of what should be communicated to customers and what is futile. They would specifically want to know, "Is the communication that I am sending to my customers adding any value to them or my business? Will I be able to fulfill my objectives without sending that communication piece? " Here is where marketing research experts suggest using the Control & Experiment group.

Experimental Group

An experimental group is a subset of customers we target in an experiment who receive the communication being tested.

Control Group

A control group is a subset of the customers we are targeting with a particular campaign, who do not receive the campaign. It serves as a baseline for the experiment group to compare the campaign performance. When you compare the variation with the control, you can check the campaign's impact, whether customer engagement and conversions were better or worse if the specific campaign was not sent to some customers. While no communication is being sent to the control group, MoEngage tracks the conversions for the users in this group.

The following snapshot offers a comparison between the control group and the message. We can see that by sending the notification, the marketer could increase the primary conversion goal by 126%.

So, whenever you need to communicate with customers, use a control group to establish its (f)utility. For more information on creating an experiment using MoEngage, click here. 

Include a control group in your experiment

You can enable Control Groups for the campaign during Step 1 of campaign creation. In the Control groups section, you can do the following:

1. Turn the Global control group toggle on to exclude the users in the global control group for the campaign.
2. Turn the Campaign control group toggle on to exclude the users in the control group from the campaign. As shown below, you can specify the percentage of users from the target audience to be excluded from the campaign.