Why You Should Be Conducting A/B Testing On Your Email Marketing

Why You Should Be Conducting AB Testing On Your Email Marketing

You’ve heard from us on many occasions that A/B testing is a great tool to optimize your landing pages. We’ve told you that for each test you run, you learn something new about your audience – something that helps you reach them more effectively.

You’ve learned what it takes to meet their needs while improving your conversion rate optimization.

The same holds true for email marketing – A/B testing is a good thing. It’s the key to your email conversion rate.

So, today, we tell you why you should be conducting A/B testing on your email marketing and some best tips for doing it.

What is AB Testing?

Just the mention of A/B testing might sound complicated and quite daunting. But, we’re here to tell you that it’s not as hard as it sounds.

A/B testing is the method you use to test your best guess about human behavior. In other words, you are testing what you think they’ll respond to.

Using your email platform, you can perform these “split” tests quite easily testing things such as headlines, send times, content and images.

Let’s simplify A/B testing. For example, you’ve written a blog post, you’re ready to send it out through email, and you’ve chosen two images. You want to know which image is more compelling for people, so you set your split test with the same content but two different images.

In your email app, you set your A/B test to learn which one garners more opens. The app chooses a winner, and your winning email is off to the rest of your list. It’s just that easy.

You’ve just used an A variant and a B variant as a split test to gauge the response of various headlines, calls to action or images.

If you’ve ever wondered what the best open times are for your emails, you can also test send times.

The best part of email A/B testing is it requires very little effort on your part. You pick the one item you want to test, set it up, choose how much of your list you want for test subjects, and then you let the program do the heavy lifting for you in determining which test is the winner.

A/B Testing Best Practices

As easy as A/B testing is using various email platforms, there are few general best practices to guide you through the process.

First, you want to have a reason behind what you’re testing. Don’t just test for the sake of testing. Ask yourself what you’d like to improve. Is it open rate or click through rate?

Why are you testing? Do you want to learn what subject lines engage your audience? How about personalization? Do you want to know if the personal touch gets more opens? Does your audience respond to images with people, landscapes or humorous images? Does your audience respond better in the morning or evening? Should you use numbers in your subjects?

These are just some ideas when it comes to the purpose of your A/B test. You can pick any, just be sure to pick one reason why.

Next, you want to be purposeful in your test. Make sure that the item you’re testing is bold. For example:

  • Test an image of a woman and an image of a man.
  • Test a red call to action button against a blue one.
  • Test a subject line that is personal against one that includes stats.

When you are very deliberate with the items you are testing, you can use a smaller sample size. In addition, we recommend only testing two variants. Some programs will allow you to choose more, but two gives you better results.

Here are some ideas of things you can test:

  • Call to action
  • Subject line
  • Testimonials – included or not included
  • Layout of email
  • Personalization
  • Body Text
  • Headline
  • Images
  • Your Offer – for example, you might offer free shipping in one email and 20% off in another.
  • Send time (change hour or even day)

Before acting on future emails from the result of your last A/B test, make sure your results are statistically significant.

What do we mean? Well, if test A nets 2535 opens while test B nets 2756 opens, that’s not much of a difference. Be careful here when making a decision on test results.

While your program chose a “winner,” a small statistical difference doesn’t necessarily mean one is that much better than the other. Keep testing until you get results that statistically meaningful.

Once you’ve done the test, it can be easy to forget about it. Some marketers test the email and leave it at that. But, what if you learned that your email subscribers preferred images of women in your A/B test, yet in subsequent emails you used images of men?

That isn’t a good use of your testing data. If they preferred images of women in one email, continue to test this theory for a few more emails. If women win out, use images of women in future emails.

Final Thoughts

A/B testing is the key to emails that convert. Improving your conversion rates is after all one of the main goals of your email marketing.

A/B testing gives you the ability to improve not only the email you are testing, but the performance of all future emails.

It’s the best way to make measurable improvements with your email marketing. A/B testing gives you statistical data on the tactics that work with your chosen audience.

Keep track of your testing results and make a list so you can continue to test to see if you get the same results.

Your email A/B testing lets you reach your marketing goals while improving your email open rate, click through rate and conversion rate.

Each time you get statistically significant data, and act on it, you are one step closer to your goals.

It is important to continue testing on an ongoing basis. People and their needs change daily, so it’s important to test and keep track of your results.

One great strategy to use with your email marketing is linking email articles to your website. Are you ready to handle the traffic with optimized landing pages?

If you are ready to squeeze more profit out of your website by using email marketing to skyrocket growth among your current customers, that’s great! We’re here to help you optimize your landing pages to increase email conversions. In fact, we promise you we’ll do just that.

With our guarantee, you can rest assured we will increase your profits through landing page optimization.

If you’re ready to work with the leader in landing pages and conversion rate optimization, contact us today.

We’ll provide you with our FREE site performance analysis so we can work on your landing page conversion rates.

Image: Lachlan Donald

How a peculiar Calendar cranks conversion rates on your webite

How To Grow Your Conversion Rates with an A/B Testing Calendar You want to grow your conversion rates, right? One of the best ways to do that is with A/B testing.

If you’re wondering what A/B testing is, here’s a definition: simply put, A/B testing is split testing.

Here’s an easy, real life example. You own a coffee shop, and you want to see which type of packaging sells best. You offer a green package and a yellow package. You test them for one month. In the end, you learn that people buy the same flavor of coffee more often when it’s in the green package.

You just conducted an A/B test.

As it pertains to website conversion rates, A/B testing is the comparison of two versions of a web page to see which one works better – page A or page B. You compare the two, see which one converts better, and you move forward with the one that has a higher conversion rate.

A/B testing takes you from “you think” to “you know.” You might have “thought” people would like the yellow package, but after the test, you realized the green sells better. The same thing applies to website marketing.

A/B split testing allows you to spend your online dollars wisely because you learn what drives your customers and compels them to take the desired action.

In this article, we’re going to talk about how to grow your conversion rates with an A/B testing calendar.

You’re probably thinking, What the @&%# Jon?!?! Who cares about a stupid calendar? That isn’t going to increase anything. I have a My Little Pony Calendar from 2013 sitting on my desk, and it does nothing but collect dust.”

OK, got it. You’re right, sort of. Putting your strange fetish in desk calendars aside, a testing calendar keeps you testing, even when you don’t want to. When you’ve grown bored or frustrated or are just to busy cleaning out the 31,384 emails that accumulated in your email box before the end of the year.

To be successful, you must be disciplined and keep pushing. After a while you will gain insights and break-throughs you never thought possible. Put a calendar together and kick yourself in the ass and get moving. These are the basics that actually work. The results WILL come!

Make a Plan

You don’t want to be testing just for the sake of testing. You want to amplify your conversion rate optimization, so you want a plan, a guide that moves you forward on a profitable path.

Continue reading “How a peculiar Calendar cranks conversion rates on your webite”

A/B Testing vs. Multivariate Testing: Which is Best For You?

If you have a website, you need to make sure that you market it well. However, to do that, you need to know exactly what your customers are looking for. There are a variety of ways to do this, but the two most debated options are A/B testing and multivariate testing. What are the differences? Which is better for your site?

Learning the Basics of the Two

First, you need to understand the differences between A/B testing and multivariate testing. There are several key differences, so establishing those is the first move creating the most effective landing page.

  • A/B testing – After creating two versions of a website, you split the traffic coming to your site evenly between the two.
  • Multivariate testing – You only have one version of the website. You are testing a variety of elements inside the page, to see what is most popular.

Continue reading “A/B Testing vs. Multivariate Testing: Which is Best For You?”

3 simple landing page optimization tips that will keep you from burning your house down

Ideas are like sparks. Some do nothing. Others light a fire that keeps you warm and happy. And others burn your house down. Some landing page optimization tests can explode in your face.3 tips for landing page optimization fire safety

In marketing, you need to separate the good sparks from the bad. Ideas that are based on opinion and anecdotes are often bad. Ideas that are based on research, metrics and facts are much more likely to be good.

Here’s how you can use testing to keep your butt out of the fire.

Start testing and stop arguing

Here’s a scenario: your colleague wants to divert all of your resources into building a microsite. Why? Because you need it for a campaign next month and that’s what everyone else is doing. Your boss nods.

Red alarms blare in your head:

  • We’ve never tried this before!
  • How will we hit this month’s numbers?!
  • Have I updated my resume?

This is when you should condemn your colleague as a fool – just kidding! People with ideas are brave, so don’t attack them. Arguing doesn’t accomplish anything.

Instead, propose a three-step test.

Step #1. Pick something simpler

Continue reading “3 simple landing page optimization tips that will keep you from burning your house down”

A/B Tests: Why a higher conversion rate is only the beginning

Become a Marketing Genius

A/B testing gives you more than a lift in conversions. If you test one page each month, you’ll notice a shift. Your marketing team will write different copy. Your design team will create different layouts. Executives will make your coffee (ok, maybe not that last one, but still).

In many ways, A/B tests are only the beginning — and that point is completely overlooked in a recent article from Wired magazine: The A/B Test: Inside the Technology That’s Changing the Rules of Business.

This article is really, really good, so check it out (the print version even has a case study). Brian Christian lays out how A/B testing has taught many companies that the opinion of the highest paid person (HiPPO) isn’t worth a hill of beans compared to data.

The article is loaded with awesome quotes:

  • “Most websites suck because HiPPOs create them.” – Avinash Kaushik, Google
  • “Assumptions tend to be wrong.” – Dan Siroker, Optimizely
  • “In God we trust. All others, bring data.” – Bill Clerico, WePay

The article doesn’t fly off the tracks, but the crazy train starts rolling a little fast when it starts talking about results. Why should editors waste time debating headlines, it implies, when they can test them and let the results decide? And here’s another quote:

“[On a page], why do people like the ottoman better if it appears to the left of the throw rug than if it appears to the right? There’s no time to ask the question, and no reason to answer it. After all, what does it matter if you can get the right result? Keep testing, keep reacting, and save your philosophizing for the off-hours.”

A/B Testing Will Make You a Marketing Genius

Lowering your head and plowing through tests might seem efficient, but it’s really wasteful. Sure, maybe the landing page is earning more conversions, but what else have you got? The answer is nothing unless you take the time to “philosophize” about what happened.

Continue reading “A/B Tests: Why a higher conversion rate is only the beginning”