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Lovepop and A/B testing Done Right

Learn how testing helped the custom pop‑up greeting card company double their engagement and revenue.

Hero image for Issue #94: Featuring Lovepop

Welcome back, party people! This week, we’re continuing to share some of the awesome ways our Boston customers use Mailchimp. For our latest, we dropped in on a company challenging the traditional greeting card model.

Lovepop started with a trip to Vietnam 4 years ago. It was there, as part of Harvard’s Innovation Lab, that naval ship architects Wombi Rose and John Wise were introduced to the art of kirigami. The ancient art form fuses elements of paper cutting and origami. Wombi and John were drawn to the sliceform construction of the pieces, which they felt mirrored the way a ship’s structure is put together. Having found their muse, the guys decided to turn their love for kirigami into a full-fledged business.

Unlike your standard greeting card, Lovepop’s A-Team of engineers and designers uses advanced ship design software to create their layout, and each piece of paper art is hand-assembled. The hand-crafted, 3-D paper greeting cards are in high demand from customers looking to break the traditional mold of saying, “I Love You,” “Happy Birthday,” or “Congratulations.” The company has even secured big-name clients such as HBO’s Game of Thrones and the Billboard Music Awards.

We visited Lovepop’s Boston headquarters to find out how the team is making use of Mailchimp’s A/B and Multivariate Testing to accomplish their goal of disrupting the $7 billion greeting card industry.

How does Lovepop arm itself to take on the Hallmarks and Papyruses of the world? Well, their metric for measuring success is creating “magical moments,” which happen when “somebody feels special or somebody feels cared about—you’ve gone out of your way to do something for someone,” Wombi says.

To date, the Lovepop team says they’ve put out 4 million magical moments, thanks in part to their use of Mailchimp's A/B Testing. John and Wombi’s team use A/B Testing to test subject line copy, what time of day to send the campaign, and whether to place emoji in their text.

“It’s not always obvious when something’s going to work in an email,” Wombi says. “So knowing that you have a statistically robust way to test it is really valuable.”

So, how does this tool work for Lovepop IRL? John and Wombi used A/B Testing for 2 different campaigns promoting Valentine’s Day card packages. The guys found that Email B had an open rate that was 1.1% higher than Email A. Email B also had a .3% higher click-through rate, which ultimately led to more sales ($2,163 more, to be exact), thus making it the winner.

John and Wombi say that by using A/B Testing and Mailchimp Pro feature Multivariate Testing, they were able to develop a new email strategy that doubled Lovepop’s engagement (click through and open rates) and revenue in 2017.

“When you’re trying to create magical moments, everything is about knowing the context, and knowing what your customer is going to respond to,” Wombi says. “A/B and Multivariate Testing in Mailchimp allow us to learn—really quickly—what engages our customers.”

The Lovepop crew says they had been working with a much more expensive competitor, and found that they needed a dedicated full time technical resource just to use the software. Now, they’ve instead focused their resources on being sensitive to the shopping habits of their customers.

“By being able to test side-by-side over a long period of time, we can better understand our customers and better present them the materials they want,” John says.

Could this work for your business? If you have a paid plan, you can try setting up your own A/B Test..

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