A/B Testing for Email Marketers: Why You Should Do It

Email marketers have a number of concerns when it comes to running a successful email marketing campaign. The first thing to do, obviously, is creating an attractive landing page in order to build your email list.

A lot of effort should also go into optimizing the email copies you’re sending out to the subscribers in order to increase conversion rates.

Note: The importance of memorable business numbers for the image of a company cannot be overemphasized as it helps to increase the response rate of the target audience since they can easily remember the numbers. I’ll throw more light on how to conduct A/B Testing to get memorable business numbers in my future post.

You might have already heard of A/B testing being used for websites, but did you know that it’s just as useful when used for email marketing campaigns?

What is A/B Testing?

A/B testing (also known as multivariate testing) is a method that involves presenting two variations of a site or email copy to site visitors or newsletter subscribers, respectively.

These two versions only have one element that has been varied between them. For example, you can use a landing page with two different color themes and determine which one was able to get more people to sign up and submit their email addresses to your site.

Another example is in the actual email copy itself, where you can have one email include images while the other one will only have plain text. You can then determine which version is better by finding out which one generated more clicks or made more sales.

A/B Testing for Landing Pages

Email marketers know how important it is to have a good landing page. In fact, it’s the first thing to take care of when building your email list: having a good-looking and well-designed landing page.

Landing pages are a whole lot simpler and contain a smaller number of sub-pages compared to typical websites.

Some elements that you can test out on these landing pages include: color theme, font face, font size, formatting, call to action, images being used, image placement, name of a web page, length of content, and location of the signup form.

A/B Testing for Email Copies

After building your email list, the next thing to work on is creating good, email copies that will get you leads and generate sales. These email copies contain the actual messages that you will be sending to the people in your email list. Optimizing the messages you send out will bring you good results when it comes to conversions.

Some elements that you can test out in these email copies include the following: email subject, the greeting of the emails, use of headings and sub-headings, use of bold-face and indentation, image usage, formatting, and call to action.

 How to Conduct an A/B Test

The first step in conducting an A/B test is to determine which element to test out. You can start by creating a list of the elements that you can test on the landing page or in the actual email copy. Rank these by priority so you can easily choose which one to test first.

The second step is to design the test. You should prepare two versions of the element you want to do the test on. These versions should be the best ones that you have come up with for each variation.

The third step is to carry out the test. For landing pages, you can set up your web server with a script that will display the two site variations randomly to your site visitors.

For your email copies, you can set up your email program or service to send out one version of your email to one half of the list, and then send the other version to the other half.

The fourth step is to gather the data from the test and interpret the results. The version that gives you the best results should be the one implemented on your landing page or in your subsequent email copies.

You should then continue to conduct A/B tests on the remaining elements as you’ve listed in the first step.