Email marketing is one of the foremost popular ways for companies to nurture leads and stay top of mind with their audiences. In fact, the Content Marketing Institute’s latest research found that 87 percent of B2-B marketers use email marketing to nurture leads. While this tactic is popular, there’s also fierce competition in today’s inbox say the Marketing Agency experts. The typical office worker receives 121 emails per day, and it’s estimated that there are 235.6 billion business emails sent and received every day. In 2019 and beyond, that number is merely expected to grow.

So how does one rise above today’s cluttered inbox and send messages that your audience pays attention to? The solution is simpler said than done: you have to send great emails that individuals actually want to read. While this can be no cakewalk, the wonder of email marketing is that you simply get constant feedback from your audience because you’ll see the open rate, click rate, etc. for nearly every email that you just send.

In this blog post, we’ll discuss the following points

What is A/B testing?

Why Email A/B Testing Should Be Your opening move as a Marketer?

What elements do you have to A/B test in your emails?

How to Run a Successful A/B Test?

1. Identify the matter to resolve.

2. Consider potential variables.

3. Prioritize your testing.

4. Define success.

5. Test, measure, refine, repeat.

What is A/B testing?

A/B testing, within the context of email, is the process of sending one variation of your campaign to a subset of your subscribers and a distinct variation to a different subset of subscribers, with the final word goal of understanding which variation of the campaign garners the simplest results.

A/B testing can vary in complexity, and easy A/B tests can include sending multiple subject lines to check which one generates more opens, while more advanced A/B testing could include testing completely different email templates against one another to work out which one generates more click-throughs.

If you’re using email tools like Campaign Monitor, A/B testing your campaigns is incredibly easy, as you’ll use the email builder to make 2 different variations of your email and it’ll automatically send it to 2 different subsets of your list to work out which variation performs best.

Once the test has concluded and therefore the winning version has been found, it’ll automatically send the winning version to the remainder of your list.

Why Email A/B Testing Should Be Your opening move as a Marketer?

When you step foot within the enthralling world of CRO, we are inundated with a gracious sprinkling of terminologies – “Landing Page Optimization”, “A/A”, “A/B/N”, “Above The Fold”, “Below The Fold”, and so on so forth!

We rarely consider A/B testing our email marketing strategy exclaims the experts from the Digital Marketing Agency Jacksonville. Year after year, email marketing delivers the best ROI across all acquisition channels. Therefore, it’s sensible to concentrate on addressing ways in which you can enhance your email marketing efforts that yield even higher ROI.

A/B testing could be a great tool to assist improve your email marketing performance— but given that you recognize what you’re doing.

Experimenting along with your email campaigns would allow you to check and contrast the weather that might gauge their impact on your subscribers’ reactions.

A/B testing is done by forming a hypothesis and then formulating a test to work out the results.

With A/B testing, you can:

• Increase the open and click-through rates:

The tool allows you to spot common factors and trends which will help increase open and click-through rates. For instance, make your emails mobile-friendly, show relevant information in images, and use a responsive email design that may allow it to all or any screen sizes.

• Increase conversion rate and generate revenue:

With high click-through rates, there are chances that your subscribers are clicking on your website and interested in the call-to-action (CTA) buttons like filling out forms according to the Digital Marketing Jacksonville experts. you’ll identify what percentage of open emails led to sales or leads.

• Get clarity about your target group’s expectations:

Your communication should be very relevant to your target group’s interests. you would like to grasp them well to grasp their behavior, and hence, their expectations. Craft your personalized emails by addressing them with their names. you’ll do so by creating targeted content for the segmented list and addressing their pain points with an answer by privately arriving in their mailbox.

Save time and money:

A lot of cash, energy, and time is spent on creating landing pages, and forms, and sending emails to a broad audience. Through A/B testing, you’ll formulate the correct recipe for a successful campaign by implementing incremental changes, resulting in statistically significant results.

What elements do you have to A/B test in your emails?

A/B testing or split testing is the practice of showing two variants of the identical web content to different segments of tourists at the identical time and comparing which variant drives more conversions. Typically, the one that provides higher conversions is the winning variant, applying, which may facilitate optimizing your site for better results states the experts from Marketing Agency.

You can A/B test the email campaigns by sending a little of your list one version of an email and therefore the other a special version while you await changes in your open rate, click-through rate, or other KPI.

The elements that you just can A/B test are:

• Email subject line:

Test the topic line for its length, topic, personalization, and also the reasonable promotion you’re attending to run through the emails.

• Preheader:

Try and include a preheader, and test it against preheader subject lines you’ll hypothesize would help increase the open rate. you’ll be able to also try personalizing the preheaders by adding the primary name of the email recipient.

• Different times and days:

You must test different time zones as you’ll be catering to a worldwide audience, which implies that sending the time of an email will affect your open rate.

Send emails on weekdays as people are able to test their emails on weekdays as compared to weekends. For instance, if you mostly send your newsletter on Tuesdays, try sending it on Wednesday at the identical time to work out what happens.

Many studies are done on the most effective days and times to send emails. Here’s an excellent display of open and click-through rates from GetResponse, analyzing 21 million US-based emails.

Also, testing periods of your time to send a message on users abandoning the location would facilitate your optimization of the open and click-through rates, which eventually affect your sales.

• Visuals:

Since our brain reacts better to visuals than text, you create your copy super engaging by incorporating compelling visuals.

• Personalization:

There is nothing better than personalizing your email design as per the expectations of your prospects. you’ll only accomplish this through effective communication. Your audience actually listens to you once you address them by their names, and greet them through the proper channel, at the proper moment, with the proper message. they’re possible to have interaction together with your content if they entrust you with the solutions to their pain points.

• Content:

Content is that the king! Your content is the copy you write, images, videos, gifs, and their placement during a particular layout to form your email look engaging.

Below are some interesting parameters that you simply should test in your content:

• Length: you want to A/B test your copy for its length to grasp and conclude if your audience prefers a short-form copy with links or a long-form copy to delve deeper.
• Specific or generic: You don’t know what would work best for your target group, so it’s recommended that you simply test your copies as of specific and generic and see which one gets more traction.
• Positive, neutral, or provocative: By incorporating positivity in your copy, you’re engaging with your reader’s brain in a very powerful way that may lead to a far better understanding of your message. Your readers are more likely to convert if you engage them and motivate them through a sturdy and well-written copy.

• CTA and buttons:

Your call to action may be tested against copy and color.

Copy: By testing generic CTA’s like “Buy more” against specific CTAs like “Get your custom denims here,” you would possibly be able to understand which works wonders for your brand.

Color: Your CTA button must complement the remainder of your email body and stand out. As an example, a CTA button in green on a white background is extremely impactful.

How to Run a Successful A/B Test?

Follow these simple steps to style and execute A/B tests that provide reliable, relevant data:

1. Identify the matter to resolve.

Do your emails get low open rates? Low clickthrough rates? High churn? Establish the metric that you simply want to enhance before you are doing anything. That way, you recognize the way to evaluate the success of your tests.

2. Consider potential variables.

Different problems merit different approaches. If you would like to boost your open rates, consider some email subject line tricks, the time of delivery, or the name of the person sending the e-mail. We’ve experimented with several different “From” fields in our own A/B tests. To influence click-through rates, change things within the emails, just like the layout or the decision to action. Put yourself in your audience members’ shoes and then consider the factors that influence their decisions.

Here are some samples of variables that you simply can consider testing:

• Subject line content and format
• Delivery time
• Delivery date
• Button design
• Button text
• Newsletter layout
• Personalization
• Headline text
• Body text
• Image size/placement/content

3. Prioritize your testing.

If you experience problems with both open rates and click-through rates, start with the one that would make the most important immediate impact. Even a one hundred pc click-through rate doesn’t mean much if only 1 person opens your emails. Pick the variable with the best potential, then design your test around that one.

4. Define success.

“Better open rates’ or ‘ are great, but “better” isn’t scientific. Establish benchmarks and make predictions about what would make this test successful. If you don’t have internal benchmarks, MailChimp provides a comprehensive list of email statistics to urge the ball rolling. 

5. Test, measure, refine, repeat.

No single test can tell you which strategy to follow for the remainder of your company’s life. Run your A/B test for a group amount of your time, evaluate and act on the results, then run another test to stay pushing your KPIs.

From creating hypotheses to writing engaging crafty email messages that warrant a desired open rate, it’s vital to A/B test every new change that you just want to deploy in your email marketing campaigns. Also, do remember that increase in your conversion rate may be a result of a mixture of multiple marketing campaigns like retargeting via push notifications besides email. A mindful distribution of resources among these two tools can positively impact your bottom line and improve general conversions. You can also refer to our post on top tips to reduce email bounce rate and enhance your deliverability.