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A/B email testing

A/B testing lets you run two variants of any transactional email (welcome, approval, commission earned, payout sent) and pick the one with the higher open rate.

Create a test

Affiliates → Email → A/B tests → New test:

  1. Template — choose the transactional email to test
  2. Variant A — current copy (control)
  3. Variant B — your alternative
  4. Split — 50/50 default; adjust if you want a smaller test slice
  5. Sample size — 100 recipients default; minimum for statistical confidence
  6. Activate

The next 100 recipients of that template are split 50/50 between variants. After 100 recipients per variant, the test reports a winner based on open rate.

What’s tracked

  • Sent count per variant
  • Open rate (via tracking pixel — see below)
  • Statistical confidence (basic z-test against the null hypothesis of equal performance)

Click tracking is queued for v1.2. v1.1.0 tracks opens only. Until v1.2, judge variants on open rate alone.

Open tracking

A 1×1 transparent GIF pixel is embedded in HTML email variants. When the email is opened, the pixel loads from ?asteris_aff_pixel=1&token=… and counts the open.

Affiliates can disable pixel tracking individually in their portal (GDPR-friendly). Disabled-pixel opens don’t count against either variant.

Pick a winner

After the sample size is reached:

  • Auto-pick winner (default) — variant with higher open rate becomes the default; the test stops
  • Manual review — admin chooses; useful for close results or when you want to inspect variant content first

Beyond transactional emails

A/B testing covers transactional emails only in v1.1.0. Marketing email A/B is queued for v1.2 (requires email-marketing module which we don’t ship — recommend pairing with Asteris for WordPress’s SMTP module + an external campaign tool).