Fact: A/B Testing is crucial for any email marketing strategy.
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“We've been working with CodeCrew for 4 months now and it's been great. Their emails are always high quality and our brand has certainly grown since we started working with them.”
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Increasing the number of people that open your emails is one of the most important variables to prioritize. The number of link clicks that you get ultimately leads to an increase in revenue, which is the whole point of having an email marketing campaign in the first place.
Over and over again, we’ve seen the impact that email A/B testing can have. In the case of PetLab Co, our A/B testing efforts raised their click rates by 53.33%. Click here to read the full case study.
Achieving a strong A/B test is as simple as creating two slightly-different variations of an email, with the differences being dependent on a hypothesis that you’ve posed, either through data collection or historical knowledge. Of course, there’s a bit more to it than that, but you get the idea.
You’ll have email variation A and email variation B, both of which will be sent to your subscribers. Judging from what makes the two different, as well as the engagement they both receive based on the KPI that dictates the winner/loser, one variant of your campaign will either be a success or a failure compared to the other. Tests can also be inconclusive and in cases like these, you’ll need to test the same variable a few times until a proven winner becomes visible.
How you go about your testing is just as important, so it’s a good idea to have professionals at the helm to help you decide.
Knowing exactly what kind of imagery, wording, subject lines, and send times your audience responds to will not only ensure customers see value in your business, but will also ultimately lead to sales.
Little by little, you get a clear idea of what works for your audience. Soon, you’ll be sending emails at the exact moment a customer checks their inbox, the subject line will be the right length, and your text-to-image ratio will be perfect. The more you learn about your audience through A/B testing, the more you can apply these learnings to your email program and the better your bottom line will be.
Our process is quite scientific. We start by analyzing your current email marketing campaign. After that, we measure the results of the campaign so we can alter it and see how those results differ with each change. After that, we’ll start making predictions based on all the different results, refining our expectations over time, and modifying our approach from an informed position.
Basically, no stone is left unturned. We test each and every email that is sent, from email marketing automation flows to sales campaigns. Picking the right test variable is as important as the test itself. Depending on how impactful the test is and the hypothesis, we’ll either start by getting your whole list in on the action or a small-yet-mighty segment that can be used as referential for the broader audience.
The whole point of testing is for you to be able to make improvements based on what you’ve learned. We put each indicator under the spotlight, comparing them as they are to determine what changes need to be made.
It’s important to identify progress, otherwise, it’ll be difficult to make any more of it. One of the key benefits to entrusting your program with an email marketing agency is their depth and breadth of experience in looking through the data to achieve the best result possible. With this deep insight and ability to quickly apply it moving forward, a step-by-step effort has to be made so you can realistically achieve your objectives.
Marketers go to great lengths to make email subject lines that ‘pop’ and for good reason. The subject line is the first thing that a customer sees and it’s your one chance to get them to open your emails.
From personalization to adding an emoji or two; there are many ways to draw attention to your emails. A/B Testing will give you an idea of which wording works best. Yes, shorter is usually sweeter, but what about the sequence in which the words appear? What you put first or last will have a huge bearing on your engagement stats.
Thanks to the wonders of email design, you can add visuals to go along with your messages. Now, images can either work for you or against you, and in addition to throwing in a picture or having a unique background, the layout is worth looking into as well as it helps to know how messages will appear on different kinds of devices. Luckily, we happen to have an award-winning email design team that can effortlessly balance aesthetics and functionality for you.
Another aspect to consider is the copywriting that goes into your emails. Ideally, your copywriting strategy should be backed by hard data. What type of mood does the writing in the body of the email evoke? What word count is most ideal for an email and how many words are too many or too few? These are questions that can easily be answered after a bit of A/B testing. Your content is the main event, so anything that’ll improve it is great for your overall marketing agenda.
In order to transform mere interest from a customer into an actual sale, you’ll need to understand the habits of your leads. Once you get a picture of your customer’s behavior, you must grasp the motive behind that behavior. A/B testing can give you insight into what guides a person to the sale so you can replicate that process in order to get more conversions.
A test is only as good as the tools that it’s conducted with. We’ve worked with countless ESPs over the years and few things are more important to us than digital tools that work and work well.
While all proper ESPs have A/B testing capabilities, not all are created equal. Some ESPs allow for A/B tests that others don’t - and that’s where experience comes into play. Since CodeCrew is well-stocked in the experience department, the possibilities are endless. So you can run as many tests as you want, as often as you want, and identify patterns, trends, and segments accurately.
You need to know what data you’re trying to harvest and what you’re going to do with that data. Whenever we make a small tweak in each email, we analyze the results to see how well each one does. After all, you can’t conduct a test without extracting as much insight as possible from the results. Having a game plan makes it easier for us to accurately measure your success.
How important an A/B test is, depends entirely on what you wish to improve - whether it’s open rates, click rates, or even the average order value. The latter, for example, could be tested by including a recommended product reel in your campaigns.
Once you’ve learned that your customers prefer A over B, there’s no point in B hanging around. Theoretically, by sticking to A with all future campaigns, you’ll see an improvement in engagement (and hopefully conversion rates). The next question is, of the A versions, do your customers like C or D? If D is the winner, all future emails will adhere to AD, and so on.
“CodeCrew has been enormously helpful in building out our email marketing program and everything around it that contributes to more engaged customers and more online sales!”
At CodeCrew, we’re all about the research. So before we begin the A/B Testing process for any of our clients, we learn as much as we can about their target audience by looking at their data, compiling sample personas, finding trends, and applying all available insights at our fingertips.
From there, we go in and conduct A/B Testing as soon and as frequently as possible while also ensuring that all tests are relevant and up-to-date, as with open rate-related testing in the world of iOS15 and onward. In order to stay at the forefront, we need to go hard on those tests so that we’re ready for any changes in the market or in customer preferences.
All of this helps to maximize our clients’ email marketing campaigns, and our success with this process has been incredible.
But don’t take our word for it -
our results say it all.
Have a chat with us about putting your emails to the ultimate test
and experience the results for yourself.
Email marketing A/B testing is when we create two emails with only one difference between them. Then we monitor the performance of both emails to ascertain the effect of that one variable. By doing this with subject lines, send times, images, etc., we get a solid idea of what works with a particular audience. Plus, once we’ve noted a definite audience preference, we’ll ensure that subsequent emails adhere to this. Essentially, A/B testing is an empirical method of leveling up your marketing, since we rely on analytics and data to create jaw-dropping email campaigns. So, we’re basically scientists. Kind of.
It’s simple: We create two versions of the same email - let’s call them Email A and Email B, and both are exactly the same, except for one thing: Email A has a short subject line, and Email B has a longer subject line. We hit send and watch the data stream in. If we see that Email A is performing better than Email B, then it means the audience prefers shorter subject lines. And, since both are the same otherwise (including sending time), it’s a pretty reliable indicator that we should be using short subject lines from now on. Eureka!
Not much, besides knowing what your audience prefers and skyrocketing your ROI. Seriously, though, A/B testing is perhaps the most important tool in your marketing toolbox. It doesn’t cost extra, and you get priceless information on what works for your audience. If you knew (for a fact!) that your customers read emails just before noon, why would you want to send them any other time? And how much is that crucial bit of information worth to your business? Exactly. A/B testing is the very definition of stellar ROI… as long as you know how to interpret the data correctly.
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