It is now time to set up your A/B test with the email service that you are currently using. Although the specific steps required to complete this process may differ slightly depending on your email service provider, you should not have too much trouble. Let’s take a look at the four steps that you need to take in order to conduct an A/B test on your email subscribers.
- Select a variable to examine
- Create two versions of the same email
- Pick the test subjects
- Analyze and apply your findings
Select a variable to examine
To get started, you will need to make a decision regarding which variable you want to check with your target demographic. What you focus on will determine how you optimize your email marketing campaigns.
If you want to increase the number of people who actually open your emails, for instance, comparing two different subject lines could be helpful. Test whether or not the sender line reads differently when a person’s name is used instead of a business.
Testing the effectiveness of a button versus a hyperlink for your CTA, as well as the impact of repositioning the CTA, can help you increase your click-through rate.
Create two versions of the same email
The following step is to make two variations of the same email. For instance, say you’re interested in discovering which subject line produces the highest click-through rates. You’ll write two variations of the subject line to see which one gets the most clicks. After that, you can contact your email provider to initiate an A/B test.
Pick the test subjects
The next step is to divide your sample into two groups for testing. The number of people in each testing group will change based on how many subscribers you have and what you hope to achieve with the campaign as a whole. It’s possible that you’ll want to put your entire subscriber list to the test at some point. That way, you can get a clear picture of what resonates most with your target demographic. Sometimes you only want to check a subset of the whole list.
The goal is to maximize the number of people who take advantage of your test offer. To be safe, you may want to start with a subset of your list and expand from there.
Is there a way to estimate how many people should be in the sample? If you have more than 1,000 people on your email list, you should probably test 20% of them. That’s right; only 10% of your mailing list will get the email with the first subject line, while the other 10% will get the email with the second subject line.
Analyze and apply your findings
Time to sit tight and then do some serious data crunching. If you want to know which subject line got the most clicks, your email provider should be able to tell you. Once you determine which subject line performed the best, you can use that information to send emails to everyone on your list.
No, you still have some work to do. The next time you send out an email campaign, make sure to split test it. Remember that you should never test more than one variable at a time. If you test multiple variables in a single email, you won’t know which one contributed most to the success or failure of your campaign.