A/B Email Testing And Effective Email Testing Techniques For 2021

All the marketers have an objective of making better open and click-through rates which will bring more traffic. Bringing more customers can be done by running your email campaigns on A/B email testing.

What Is A/B Email Testing, And Why Is It Important For Email Marketing Campaigns?

A/B email testing is a process of sending one variation of your email campaigns to a subset of your readers or subscribers and a different variation to another set of readers or subscribers. From these two sets, the one who performs the best and effectively will be selected.

A/B email testing can differ with complexity. In simple A/B email testing, you can send multiple subject lines to test which one brings more traffic. In advance of A/B email testing, you can test different email templates against each other and see who brings more traffic.

Some email tools can make your A/B email testing easy and simple by using email builder to create 2 different email types and send directly to two different sets of subscribers or readers and look who is performing best.

After the A/B email testing is done, the best version will send the emails to the rest of your subscribers or readers.

Making A/B email testing to every email campaign will help you bring maximum traffic and increase the open and click-through rate.

Facts And Figures For A/B Email Testing

Brands Split On Split Testing

40% of brands ignore or don’t use any testing or segmentation for their emails.

These brands or marketers think that they are far better and effective in their emails, and they don’t need any testing.

But if they fail in A/B email testing, their whole email marketing campaign will be of no use.

If you do A/B email testing for your emails, you have a guarantee that your email will perform best.

Small Changes Make Big Differences

A/B email testing will show you minute things which can make a big difference in your email campaigns.

Like when HubSpot had tested two emails, one as a personalized email and the other as a generic company name email.

It is found that the email which is having a person’s name had a 0.54% high open rate and 0.24% high click-through rate. These might look like small digits, but the effect of these percentages is too high as it helped to gain 132 leads.

Important Elements That Need Testing

Subject Lines

“On average, 8 out of 10 people will read your headline copy, but only 2 out 10 will read the rest.”
– Brian Clark

The subject line gives the first impression when you view anything in your inbox. Most of the subject line is dark, heavier text that makes it eye-catching from the other detailing of your emails.

The subject line should be the most important element for A/B testing as it will help increase your open rates of emails.

Length

There is always confusion on the length of any subject line. So, most marketers have kept 60-70 as their optimal length of the subject line.

But your subscribers are different from each other’s, and selecting a fixed subject line may not be that great step. So, it is better to make the subject line length as per your requirement.

Word Order

It is always tough to set your words for your email subject line to impact your email open rate.

You can use these word orders for your email subject line:

• Use discount code to enjoy 25% off on the next purchase!
• 25% off on your next product!!!

In the second example, you can see that the value or benefit is getting at the starting, which increases your email’s open rate. All the subscribers or readers look at the starting of any subject line, making them decide whether to open or ignore.

Content

The email contains multiple pieces of content like a newsletter, which are being tested as different elements of any content in the subject line. This can increase your email open rates and show which type of content people are liking.

Personalization

Did you know?

As per Slideshare, 80% of consumers are more likely to buy from a company that provides a tailored experience!

How useful can personalizing can be in increasing your ROI! 🤑

Using a person’s name in your email will greatly impact your emails and increase the email open rate by 15%. Brand Converse always puts the customer’s name in their email campaigns.

Using personalized tags with the subscriber’s name on the subject line will make your campaigns stand out from other campaigns and increase open rates, click-through rates, and the company’s sales.

Visuals

It has been found that people get more attracted to visuals. So, if we are putting more visuals and not just text, it will increase the open rates. There should be some visuals on your emails in each of the email campaigns to make it more effective. You can also do some designs or graphic effects that can help attract people and make them open the emails.

Tips For Running A/B Email Testing Effectively

There are various tools in the market with their drag-and-drop email builders, things become easy, and A/B testing is performed quickly, and you don’t have to waste time coding different versions.

But before you start your A/B email testing, there are a few tips that you have to keep in mind!

Build A Hypothesis

If you want to bring a positive increase in your conversion rate through A/B testing, you need a strategic hypothesis about why a certain version will give a better result than any other version.

Before you start, come up with some basic hypotheses. You can make your hypothesis like – if using the first name of the customer and making it personalized can increase the emails’ open rate.

Prioritize Your A/B Tests

It is not just the subject lines, button colors, and copy changes, which you want to test; rather, you can have other testing elements.

Not every A/B email testing idea is created equal, but it is up to you to prioritize your A/B testing, bringing you the best results.

It is best to use an ICE score. It is how your different A/B test ideas are checked and prioritize, which has to be run at first.

Build On Your Learnings

Never think that all the A/B testing results will give you any positive return. There can be some variations that can make your conversion decrease.

So, you should learn from each of you’re A/B testing and create better testing in the next email marketing campaign.

Wrapping Up

A/B email testing is a valuable strategy that can be used to increase your open and click-through rates. Start by making a hypothesis about what you think will work best for your business, set up the experiment ahead of time, send it out in order to test its effectiveness with real data from live customers.