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Recently I asked a bunch of business owners if they knew what email A/B testing is and if they use it in their businesses. Here’s what I found out:
Of the businesses that have an email list, 68% of them have never used A/B testing in their business. If you heard a thud, that was my jaw falling to the floor.
Having worked in the email marketing space for 8+ years, I reckon an A/B test email is kinda like having a really good teacher. Sure you could still learn some stuff on your own but with a good teacher to support you you’re gonna learn faster and have a bit more fun, too.
So what is A/B testing in email marketing and why should you care?
1. What is A/B testing in email marketing?
A/B testing, also known as email split testing, is a way of comparing two emails in order to determine which is the most effective. You can use A/B testing to determine which email will deliver better open rates, click rates, conversions, or fewer unsubscribes and spam complaints.
In an email A/B test you set up two variations of the one email and send them to a small percentage of your total recipients.
Half of the test group is sent Version A, while the other half gets Version B. The result, depending on what metric you are measuring, determines the winning version. This winning version is then sent to the remaining subscribers.
Most email marketing platforms (like ActiveCampaign and Klaviyo) offer in-built A/B testing functionality to simplify this process for you. However, if your platform does not, you can still conduct A/B tests (although a little more manual intervention will be required).
2. Benefits of A/B testing your emails
One of my favourite things about email as a marketing channel is how firmly you’re able to sit in the driver’s seat.
You own your email list and all of the customer data that comes with it. You can see exactly how a subscriber has or hasn’t interacted with your email and pivot your email marketing strategy accordingly.
And A/B testing is an essential part of this – allowing you to more intimately understand what your subscribers respond to and optimise your email marketing efforts to suit.
The benefits of A/B testing your emails include:
- Improved open rates – getting more eyeballs on your email content
- Improved click rates – getting more subscribers closer to your desired conversion
- Improved conversion rates – getting more sales/enquiries by sending emails that are optimised to drive action
- Improved unsubscribe and spam rate – reducing negative interactions with your emails but better understanding what drives this behaviour
In fact, studies show the return on investment of email marketing activity increases by 28% when A/B testing is included as part of your regular email marketing processes.
3. A/B test email best practices
While there are undoubtedly quite a few things that spring to mind as email A/B testing opportunities, there are many potential tests that you can run.
- Subject lines – using emojis, personalising with first names, questions vs. statements, ideal length.
- Your sender name – opting to use a real persons name vs using your business name.
- Send time/day – weekdays vs weekends, mornings vs nights, etc.
- Call to actions – text link vs button, colour, wording, placement in the email, number of CTAs in the email, all caps vs lowercase, etc.
- Landing pages – where are your emails directing to? Is one landing page more likely to result in conversion than another?
- Email design and length – number of paragraphs, number of images, order of content (e.g. image first or copy first?), layout (e.g. one column vs two), type of images used, etc.
Most importantly, make sure you’re only testing one element per email campaign. Otherwise, you run the risk of not knowing which change has led to which result.
In summary
- A/B testing means sending two different versions of the same email to a small segment of your mailing list and seeing which performs best.
- Testing your emails using this method means you have a better idea of what your subscribers respond to. Then, you can optomise your email marketing accordingly.
- Conducting A/B testing can help improve your open rates, click rates, conversion rates, unsubscribe and spam rates.
- You can test just about anything you want using this strategy. But make sure you’re only testing one element at a time!
