The “Do This, Get That” Guide On Email AB Testing

You can AB test everywhere: websites, emails, advertisements and what not?! While you might have had hands-on experience on how to AB test in web pages, adapting the same in emails is tricky. This blog will help you just do that — Email AB Testing is simple and effective if you want to spike up your conversion rates.

What is AB Testing?

A definition is boring. Yeah! But please bear with me this time for I’m forced to write one. In our AB Testing Guide, we have defined AB testing as,

“A method that is used to create and test variations of a web page to find out which one performs better. Creating variations of your web page is always a great way to find out which changes will work better with your target audience“

Why you should AB Test your emails?

The answer is simple: You can eliminate assumptions and stay guilt free. It doesn’t stop there, Email AB Testing helps in knowing your audience better, double conversion rate and increase revenue.

The 4 Elements To AB Test In Your Emails

Email Marketing Softwares, like MailChimp, have this covered for you. You just have to log in, select your preferences and see the winning variation for yourself in only a short span of time: from hours to days, unlike website AB testing where you wait for eternity to see results.

Subject Line: Always keep it catchy. Your subject line is what decides whether your email will be opened or put in the trash. This one line decides your clickthrough rates and email open ratio.

The “Bad” Subject Line: Monday Newsletter

Blatant. Nobody would be enticed to open an email that has a subject as bad as this. We don’t love boring ones anymore!

On the other hand, your audience would be enticed only if your subject line induces factors like curiosity, fear of missing out, humor, greed also it has to be straightforward.

An example of how a great subject line would look like:

• $75 today, $775 tomorrow
• Use this to (goal) for your (company/domain)
• Want to be an (X specialist) for a big (X company)?

From Name: You can send emails from your name or company name. Decide this based on your audience. If your audiences are the general crowd, you can use your name to sound informal. If it’s a professional crowd or sending it to a specific company, you can go ahead and mention your emailing from your “Company”. This will make your email sound more professional.

Content: The body of your email should always be crisp and easily digestible. You must always include a CTA for your audience to act upon. Without CTA, your email will lose its purpose.

Send Time: Be it social media posts or sending out emails, scheduling them is very important. It depends on your audience geographical location. If you are going to email US audience from India, let it deliver to their inbox when they are at work, not when you are.

Email AB Testing Rules To Follow

Define Your Goals

Before you begin with Email AB Testing, you should have a clear understanding of what you want to achieve from performing your email campaigns. Since it is an AB test to be run on onboarding, newsletter emails or whatsoever, there can be only 5 goals that you can define overall.

Direct Goals

• Increase Click Through Rates (CTR)
• Increase Email Open Rates
• Increase Reply Rates

Indirect Goals

• Increase Unique Page Views
• Increase Engagement

I have classified the 5 major goals as direct and indirect because if we hit the direct goals through Email AB testing, you indirectly see an increase in page views and engagement on your blog or landing pages.

Split Your Audience

AB testing is also called Split Testing for the reason that you can test by bifurcating your audience. You can get help in splitting your audience from email marketing software or just do it manually. Create a variation of your preferred element and AB test it against your current email template.

MailChimp has a slider which you can use to drag and fix your recipients’ percentage according to your preference.

Only One At A Time

Most of the women would be good at multitasking. Even I am one — I can juggle between reading and household chores seriously well! But this is not the right place to showcase my precious talent. In Email AB Testing, it’s always one at a time. If you want to yield a correct result, don’t test two elements at the same time.

If you were to test multiple elements against each other in an A/B test, you wouldn’t be able to identify the element that resulted in more opens, clicks, conversions, etc.

Analyze What You Learnt

Your Email AB test is complete only when you have derived insights from your failed test. How can one take what they learned in one test and implement it in the next test? Only through analyzing each and every test results. Furthermore, making sure it is consistent enough. That’s how you become a Specialist at this.

I have realized that analyzing your failed tests for why it didn’t perform can teach you more valuable lessons than the winning test itself.

If you find your test results to be inconclusive, it’s a fail. Your statistical significance should be at least 90 to 95% before you come to a conclusion. If you are in doubt, use this AB Significance Calculator to be confident that the changes you made have really improved your conversions.

Repeat Your Tests

Your customers keep expecting as you keep perfecting your emails. That’s why you should repeat your Email AB test often and give your customers the best email experience ever. Keep them on the hook always. These 4 elements — subject line, from name, content, send time are what you will be changing and AB Testing repeatedly. It doesn’t seem tough, does it?

Be Inspired And Take Action

This is a case study of a peer-to-peer crowdsourcing platform that connects graphic artists with those who seek designs. They ran an email marketing campaign few days before Christmas to increase their click-through rate.

They thought that mentioning just the title of the blog in the email subject line would increase their click-through rate rather than informing their recipients to check out their latest blog. They wanted to run an Email AB Test and find out if their hypothesis will work.

Variation A: Top 8 On-Page SEO Strategies for Startups in 2016

Variation B: Check out My Recent Post — Top 8 On-Page SEO Strategies for Startups in 2016

The result blew their minds. The company was able to score 5.84% higher CTR and 2.57% higher open rate by including just the title of the blog in the subject line.

You are done and all set to increase your conversions to become an Email AB Testing pro.

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