New Audience Split Tile for Unbiased Testing in Customer Insights

Marketing teams are faced with a common challenge. How do you ensure that your customers receive tailored experiences that align with your objectives?

Their goal is to maximise engagement which they can do by gaining valuable customer feedback and testing different promotional strategies. With the new audience split condition in Customer Insights (Real-Time Journeys), Microsoft can help you address these challenges.

Traditionally, you might segment your audience based on shared attributes, like demographics or purchase history, to create personalised experiences. However, there are scenarios where the number of participants in each segment is more critical than their common characteristics. For instance, if you plan to roll out a limited-time offer for the first 1,000 customers who sign up. Another scenario could be if you want to conduct different surveys for various subsets of your segment.

This is where the new audience split tile in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is helpful. Released as a preview feature, included in the Release Wave 2 2024, it enables you to split your audience into groups by percentages or specific numbers.

Marketers have different priorities which the new audience spilt tile supports them with. They can ensure unbiased testing of journey variables by distributing a random selection of contacts or leads into branches. But there will be other scenarios where there is a need to blend flexibility and control to personalise experiences while minimising complexity. This includes the example above of needing to route customers down different paths for a time limited offer.

How is the Audience Split tile different from existing conditions?

Audience Split vs A/B Testing

The audience split tile allows you to create up to 25 branches, whereas A/B testing is limited to just two. This enables you to go beyond this to test multiple experiences simultaneously for more complex journeys. In addition, you can control the distribution across numerous journey paths; for example, 10% may go down one path, 20% may go down the next, and 70% may go down the final route. You can also choose to distribute your journeys by number.

A/B testing offers control over the test. You can configure the winning criteria metrics, such as click-through rate and the test’s duration. This isn’t available in the audience split tile, so if you want to view performance, you will need to examine this manually.

Unlike A/B testing you don’t need to wait for a winner. The audience split tile distributes segment members between branches simultaneously when they reach this step in the journey.

Audience Split vs Attribute Branch

These tiles behave similarly, but the key difference is that with the attribute branch, you must choose a condition or attribute of the contact, such as location, interests, and so on. The attribute branch will check the first condition. If it’s met, it will continue down this branch in the journey. If it isn’t, it will check the following condition and again, if not, any subsequent branches. Therefore, there is inherently no control over the distribution by numbers or percentages.

The new audience split tile stands out because it allows for a truly random distribution of contacts/leads, which is crucial for unbiased testing of customer experiences. Unlike the attribution branch tile, which segments contacts based on specific attributes, the audience split tile ensures that participants are assigned to branches without any pre-existing biases.

For example, if an insurance company wanted to gauge interest in a new healthcare product, using the attribution tile might involve segmenting the audience by those already interested in healthcare and those interested in life insurance. This approach could inadvertently skew the results, as the pre-existing interests of each group would influence their responses. However, with the audience split tile, you can randomly distribute contacts into different communication branches. This would ensure that the results reflect a true measure of interest in the new product, free from the influence of prior segmentation criteria.

How to get started with audience split

It’s easy to use this new tile in your customer insights journeys. Hover over the + sign in your journey interface to add a new action, then select Audience Split in the menu of action items. It’s under the conditions group, next to the Attribute Branch.

Because this is still in preview, we can only split the audience by percentages currently, but Microsoft indicates it will be generally available in November 2024.

The screenshot below provides a flavour of how you can use the new condition. In this example we’ve distributed the segment unevenly across 3 branches.

50% to go down to the first branch that sends an email.
The second branch takes 40% of the segment and sends an SMS text message to these contacts/leads instead.
The third branch selects the remaining 10% and applies a wait timer before sending a different email.

If we wanted to equalise the distribution between these branches, this can be instantly enabled using a button in the right hand panel.

The new audience split condition offers flexible option for marketers that want to quickly divide audiences into groups to offer different experiences. For instance, this can be used to deliver perks, hone feedback collection strategies or test different communications.

While similar to A/B testing and attribute branch conditions, there is a distinction. Audience split is a valuable alternative supporting multiple branches and enabling segment members to be randomly allocated between these simultaneously for unbiased testing. We like that this control is easy to use, and you don’t need to configure complex segments across multiple journeys.

Looking to Improve your Customer Experiences?

At ServerSys, we help businesses enhance their customers’ experiences by understanding their needs. Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is the platform to achieve this.

If you want to get more from your Dynamics solution but aren’t sure how, we can help. Please get in touch with us to start a conversation today.