The A-B of Testing Your E-mail Marketing Campaign

a-b testing

The Snapshot

  • A/B testing refers to measuring the effectiveness of your marketing emails
  • Create emails that increase conversions and sales
  • Increase online communication with your target demographic
  • There are a wide variety of areas that you can modify within your email marketing campaign
  • Its ok to experiment and make mistakes (that’s how we learn)
  • Ezine.ie can help you create dynamic engaging emails

Ok we know what you are thinking! Should our headline not read the A-Z of testing your email marketing campaign? Well 9 times out of 10 you would be right, however in this case we are sorry to inform you that you are incorrect.

This is because A/B testing (also known as split testing) is a very well established method by which you can test the effectiveness of a variety of marketing campaigns to your target audience. It is basically a controlled experiment where you send 2 similar messages or in this case emails to a targeted list of your clients. You then track via email analytics which one had the highest conversion rates. This will then help you decide which approach is the most effective at targeting your customers.

Because you are typically communicating with either current clients or those that have registered an interest in your company’s products and services you are dealing with a large majority of qualified leads when you are conducting A/B testing. This clearly makes the entire process more responsive as people have indicated that they want to receive communications from your organisation.

A/B testing allows you to test a wide variety of the content within your email marketing campaign, some of the areas that you can examine include:

  • Headlines/Subject Lines
  • Content
  • Images/Pictures
  • Call To Action (CTA)
  • Graphics/Colour
  • Tag Lines

There are many other aspects of any email marketing campaign that can be tested but we did not want to dazzle you with an overwhelming list straight away. Basically you can make this process as complicated or as straightforward as you need. If you get stuck anywhere along the way you can always contact us for friendly nudge in the right direction.

It is important to consider what aspect of your email is going to have the most impact on your target demographic. For example if you are mainly a B2C  perhaps vivid colours, personalised introductions and special offers (CTA) would increase conversion rates. On the other hand if the majority of your sales are conducted within the B2B market place you would need to change your approach accordingly.

experiment

It’s An Experiment

An important aspect to remember in all of this is just like your days in science class in school it’s only an experiment. If you don’t manage to construct the highest converting and the most eye catching marketing email on your first attempt there is no need to panic! As with all things in life practice makes perfect. The more you tinker and tweak with the all the various components of your email marketing campaign the more effective it is going to become long term.

The rich functionality and features that are included within our email marketing software at Ezine makes it very easy for you to trial a variety of approaches within your email marketing activity. We are confident that our platform used effectively will help our clients connect with their existing clients and attract new ones.

It’s All About The Results

At the end of the day A/B testing is all about the Results. This data is crucial in ensuring that you are marketing your company in the most effective way possible to increase sales and brand visibility in a competitive global market place.

conversions

When you have established a winning formula it is important to build on this work and push the email that experienced the most conversion rates to as many clients in your database as possible. It is also important to remember that just because 6 months ago you had developed a very successful marketing email template does not mean that it will always work for you. This is why you need to conduct regular A/B testing to ensure that your marketing emails are always performing at the optimal level.

As usually we would be very interested to know your thoughts on this interesting and important  area of email marketing. Please do leave a comment in space provided below or share this story throughout your office and see who else knows their A-B’s.