Games By Email Risk
Sep/100
Tests, Tests and More Tests: How to Optimize Your Emails Through a/b Testing
In This Article…
If you’ve been sending to your email list for some time now but feel as though you could be getting better results, this article explains how running simple a/b tests can lead to improved open rates, click-through rates and conversions.
Testing and Email Marketing: Partners in Success
You’ve got your email campaign up and running, and now you want to make it even better. Or perhaps you’ve read some advice we’ve given and said “That’s not right. I KNOW my audience would respond better to an image based email.” For whatever reason, you’re not convinced that your email is providing the best results, and you want to see if you can improve it. That’s great, because we believe that marketing can always be improved.
One of the great benefits of email marketing is that it can make it extremely easy to run a/b tests on your marketing concepts, especially because it’s somewhat easier to control keeping things random with email.
What is an a/b Test?
An a/b test is simply a test where you present one option to one randomized segment of your audience and a different option to the other segment. Then you see which one performs better. It’s that simple.
It’s common to perform an a/b test on a website, randomly serving different offers or creatives using a javascript or Google Website Optimizer. However, email presents an alternative way to test things, without running the risk that a repeat visitor to your website may see something different than they saw the first time and skew your response rate.
Setting up an email a/b test is simple. Just divide your email list into two parts, and send them two different emails. Each email has a different part of the test in it. The one that gets a better response will tell you what the better offer, creative or sending time to use in future campaigns is.
What Kinds of Things Should be Tested?
If it’s anything that can impact the success of your email campaign in any way, then it should be tested! This includes:
- Subject lines
- Day of week of the send
- Time of day of the send
- Offer or email content
- Email creative and layout
- Html template vs. text email
- Headlines within the email
- From address
- Concepts such as personalization, email tone, etc.
The list above is fairly comprehensive. However, your industry and the end goal of your email campaign may mean that there are other factors that you want to test.
Common Mistakes with Email a/b Testing.
There are some common pitfalls to email a/b testing that you’ll want to avoid.
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Make sure your list is truly random: To do this, we recommend taking your email list and putting every other name in one test group. A good coder can write a script to do this pretty easily. One of the most common mistakes we see is that mailers will take their list, just divide it in half and then use those two halves as their a group and their b group. The problem with this strategy is that it means that one half of your list will be comprised of older sign-ups. That portion of the list will always perform in an inferior way to the newer segment of the list.
Also, once you have split your list into two, do a quick check of each half of the list as well. If one half has a predominance of, for example, Hotmail addresses, then you may experience deliverability issues with only one half of your list. That will impact the end results of your test. In general, pulling every other name and splitting your list that way will give you the best randomized representation.
- Only test one thing at a time: Another common mistake is to try to test more than one thing at a time. For example, we’ve seen people try to test a subject line and an image within the email on the same test. The only way to accurately know if the item you’re testing is, in fact, the item that created the change in results is to limit what you’re testing to one item. If you test more than one item at a time, you can’t properly determine what impact each element had on performance. As tempting as it may be to try to collect more data in less time, using more than one test factor will make that data less valuable, less accurate and less usable.
- Don’t over analyze: If you’ve set your test up correctly by making sure your list is completely random and limiting your test factor to just one element, then the results are the results. You’ve just learned something. Don’t muddy the waters with a lot of “what if” and “but”. The beauty of a true random a/b test is that the results are typically quite conclusive. Remember, in the numbers game of email marketing, it only takes a small percentage increase to make a big difference.
What to Do With Your Results
If you’ve never completed an a/b tests to your audience before, then the first thing to do is to start saving the results. After you’ve been running tests in all areas of email optimization, you’ll have enough data to create a best practice manual that you can follow in the future for creating the best headlines, subject lines, email creatives, offers and more. Then you’ll be sure that you’re running the best holistic email program that you can.
After you’ve got a best practice manual, however, there’s no reason to stop testing. The context of your audience will continue to grow and change, as will things like price point acceptance for your product, competitor activity and more. Marketing and email marketing in particular follow just one rule: Test, then test again.
The first step to getting started with email marketing, whether you’re just getting started or ready to step up to advanced techniques like a/b testing, is to select a quality email sending partner. Comm100, who provided you with this complimentary summary, offers a completely free, hosted email and newsletter solution. It’s both a great long-term and short-term solution to getting your email marketing off of the ground to just about any type of customer or client email list!
About the Author
Comm100 Network Corporation provides open source and free hosted customer support software for small and medium businesses. Comm100 fully integrates multiple communication channels, including Live Chat, Newsletter, Forum, Knowledge Base and Email Ticket. All Comm100 products are delivered as FREE SaaS/Hosted applications and completely FREE. For further information about Comm100, please visit: http://www.comm100.com/.
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