4 Reasons You Should Be A/B Testing Your Email Marketing Campaigns

The process of split testing has been a staple of the direct marketing, and more recently email marketing, field for decades now.  In case you are unfamiliar, split testing (or A/B testing) is when you split the list of people to whom you will be sending a message into multiple segments and then send different variations of your promotional material to each group in order to determine which version works best.  You can change everything from the copy, to the layout, to the colors, and then observe the response your audience has in order to see which one has the highest performance.  When it comes to emails, you can test the subject line in addition to the body of the message.

In the days of direct mail, they would include a different phone number on each version of the piece so that they could correlate which calls were generated by which piece, so that at the end of the campaign they could figure out which one was the best.  When it comes to replicating this for website visits instead of phone calls, many companies will use a series of vanity URLs that redirect visitors to their main landing page in order to track which direct mail piece generates the most attention.

Fortunately when you split test using email, you can get all of the information you need with the reporting your email marketing company provides.  The only exception is if you want to look at customer purchase behavior on your website after they click through from your email.  In that case, you will need website analytics that can track purchases and referral traffic from the email, in addition to email marketing reports.

Here are four reasons you should implement split testing with your next email marketing campaign.

1. Improved Open Rates
   The first, and easiest, place to begin is simply to test two different subjects to see which one generates better open rates.  This way you don’t have to try to create an entire second email, but you can still help improve your email’s performance.  Even if your click-through rate stays the same for now, by getting more people to open your email it will cause more total people to click through as well.In addition, you can start to pay attention to trends about what words, phrases, benefits, or promotional offers get the most opens, and make sure that you feature those items more prominently.  This idea comes up again later as well.
2. Improved Click Rates
   In order to improve click-through rates, you can also split test the body of the email.  You can play with everything from the layout, to the copy, to the colors.  Once you’ve gotten a subscriber to open your email, you can try different approaches for getting them to click through to your website to complete whatever transaction you are asking of them.If you want to take this one step further, you can also set up analytics tracking on your website that will identify all visitors from your email campaign, as well as which version of the email they received, and then look at which email not only generated the most clicks, but also led to the most conversions on the website.  You will sometimes find that, if you look all the way to the final conversion on the website, the email that drove the most traffic is not the email that drove the most conversions, because for whatever reason a majority of those visitors wind up abandoning the page before they complete the call to action.
3. Gather Customer Insights
   Let’s say you’re selling a vacuum, and you have three common selling points that you use in your marketing materials.  Your vacuums will save your customers time because they are more powerful, they take up less space because they are collapsible, and they are quieter so that you won’t bother your family or wake up your baby.  As you email your list, you can rotate which of the benefits is featured most prominently and then observe the response.You may think that your audience cares the most about power, but find that they actually open and click the email promoting how quiet your vacuum is the most.  This tells you that this is the most important feature to promote to your audience, not the power, and moving forward you can make sure that it’s the main benefit you mention in your advertising and other promotional materials as well.  This will boost not only the effectiveness of your email campaign but your entire marketing campaign as well.
4. Enhance Creativity
   This is the least-technical benefit, but also potentially the most helpful.  If you have to come up with two different emails every time you write to your list, it’s going to force you to reach outside of your comfort zone for ideas that you would have never gone searching for otherwise.  By forcing yourself to come up with a second approach to each campaign, it will get you to think outside the box more.  It’s only a matter of time before one of the new ideas you have winds up being a hit with your audience, and you would have never gone in that direction had you not forced yourself to split test.