Starting with your Salesforce Marketing Cloud user-initiated email (UIE)
The Jacquard app uses all the settings from your UIE to create a split test UIE. Your UIE should be completed as if it were going to be sent from within Salesforce, including all the settings like audience, throttling (if you have this enabled) and email, etc. This is required because when you schedule the email from the Jacquard App you won't be able to change these settings.
Scheduling from the Jacquard App
Once an experiment has been set up in the Jacquard platform, it's possible to open the experiment from the Jacquard App and schedule it using the integration settings.
In the scheduling form we ask you to select the following:
Select your user-initiated email.
Select the time.
This is the time and date your split test will be sent.How long to wait.
This is the time you want your split test to run and determines the scheduled time of the final email.Automatically send the winner.
If left unchecked, the app creates the final email but does not schedule it.
What happens when you click the Schedule button.
On clicking the schedule button, the Jacquard App:
Creates the following:
A split test UIE
This is a copy of the UIE you created with the added suffix "-splits" in the name and with the target audience data extension changed to the <your-UIE-name>-splits data extension, which is created and populated by the Jacquard App.
and Edits the:
UIE created by you:
a. Changing the subject line that you entered to AMPscript that selects the winning subject line from the "-lines" data extension.
b. Adding the "-splits" data extension to the exclusion lists. This is to ensure the recipients who receive a split test email do not get the final email.
One of the most important things to note is when you click the schedule button and see scheduling confirmation message, everything needed to execute the entire experiment is created in and is a function of Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
While the experiment is in progress, no external processes need to happen for your experiment to complete. Both the final email and split tests are scheduled and will deploy.
If a winning subject line is not determined by the split test for any reason, your experiment will still go out with the subject line entered as the human control in the Jacquard experiment creation process.
What you see in Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Studio
2 x User-initiated emails
<your-UIE-name> and <your-UIE-name>-splits
2 x Scheduled emails (if automatic winner send is enabled; otherwise, you'll only see one) in the Tracking folder
See Known Issues if you selected a tracking folder in your UIE
The data extensions and queries
What happens when the emails send (scheduled time)
The scheduled split test email will send to the recipients in the -splits data extension. The AMPscript subject line in the UIE retrieves a subject line from the -lines data extension based on the split number assigned to the recipient when the app selected the random audience from your main data extension.
Thirty minutes before the final email is scheduled, the split results query starts. This was scheduled to run at the correct time when it was created. This query gets the metrics for each split test subject line by getting the sends, opens and clicks of the split test email and filtering that by how many people got what subject line based on the split number assign to them previously. It stores these metrics in the -lines data extension.
When the split results query is complete, it contacts the Jacquard App and lets it know the query is complete. The Jacquard App reads these results from the -lines data extension and stores the data in our system (i.e. subject line, number sent, opens and clicks).
At this point, the final email will start to send (Scheduled split test time + the wait hours selected). The AMPscript in the final email subject line fetches the subject line from the -lines data extension with the best selection metric calculated by the split results query. The UIE sends to the data extension you selected when creating your initial UIE but excludes recipients that received a split test email.
If for any reason the split results query does not execute, the final email will still send at the scheduled time using the human control subject line you entered in Jacquard when creating the experiment.