A/B Testing You Should Try In Your Next Email Campaign

How do you truly know the tactics you deploy in your email marketing campaigns are working for you? Is it simply because you like the look of the data? If so, now is the time to start A/B testing to see what your subscribers truly engage with.

What is A/B Testing?

A/B testing, or split testing, is when you create two versions of one thing and put them against one another to see which performs best. We’ll delve further into examples of what you could A/B test in your email campaigns below, but here’s an example.

Let’s say you want to improve your open rate or improve your click through rate but you’re not sure what works best. This is where you’ll put two subject lines against one another.
Test A = “Free Delivery This Weekend Only”
Test B = “Did Someone Say FREE?”
You’d reserve a % of your subscribers to split these tests with i.e. 40%. Half of this reserved audience will receive Test A and the other half will receive Test B. After a specific amount of time i.e. 3 hours, the version (A or B) which received the most opens, will then be sent to your remaining audience you held back – the remaining 60%.

What Can I A/B Test In My Next Email Campaign?

  1. Subject Lines
  2. Call to actions
  3. Length of content
  4. Personalisation
  5. Send time and day
  6. Preheader text
  7. Images – static vs GIF
  8. Layout / structure

What Can Be Improved By Split Testing?

Click Through Rate
By split testing the likes of content length, layout and call to actions, you can see what works best for your click-through rate. There are various other ways to improve your click-through rate but these are basic tactics.

Open Rate
By personalising your subject lines, switching up your preheader text and experimenting with your send times, you will improve your open rate greatly.

User Experience
Split testing helps you understand what content your subscribers are engaging with the most, how they behave when receiving your emails and other things too. By gathering this data, you’re able to adapt your email designs and content to suit exactly what your subscribers want.

What A/B tests have you carried out?

Photo by Tatiana Syrikova from Pexels

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