Marketing Message—A/B Testing. Which is a more effective marketing message— a plain text email or an email with images and design elements? Statistics.com conducted an A/B test in June 2012, sending an email to a list of potential customers that was randomly split into two groups. The measure of success was whether the email was opened by the receiver or not. For some reason, the email service used by Statistics.com did not produce an even split. The results for each of the 426 sent emails are in the file email-A-B-test.csv.

a. Before conducting such a test, would you have an opinion as to which would do better: a message with or without images?

b. What were the results in terms of open rates? Which message did better? (Hint: In RapidMiner, you can use the Turbo Prep view to construct a pivot table to get this summary.)

c. We would like to know whether this difference could be due to chance, and so will conduct a statistical test. Conduct a t-test using Excel to determine whether the difference is statistically significant and report the p-value.

d. Summarize your conclusion from the A/B test.