So far in the series we’ve covered why email marketing is still relevant, measuring campaign effectiveness, the power of the Call-To-Action. This week I look at how you can learn from your previous campaign results, both sucesses and failure and seek to iterate and improve future campaigns.
One very powerful tool a good email marketing system should have, is the ability to offer A/B split testing. Even if this isn’t a feature that’s built in to your platform, you can still plan and conduct your own split test – so long as you have your campaign tracking sorted.
ONE TEST TO RULE THEM ALL
The key to successful split tests is to only test one thing… everything else should be consistent. That way you know that it was only the one change that was responsible for the different outcomes.
WHAT TO TEST
Since we showed the importance of the Call To Action on your click through rates – that’s an obvious candidate for A/B testing. You can test the wording of the CTA, or if a button, perhaps test the colour of the button – it doesn’t really matter what you test, so long as you ONLY TEST 1 change so don’t change the wording and the colour.
You might want to measure the difference in effectiveness between a CTA that reads ”Find out more” and one that read ”Reserve your place”
Another obvious candidate for A/B testing is the subject line.
Your subject line is important in that it affects your open rate. Your readers, especially those on a phone, will only see the first few words of your email subject line. So by utilising A/B tests you can learn over time what words work best at the start of your subject line.
There really is no end to what you test – you might find that the hero image at the top of your email works better if it’s a man or a woman, or maybe a family with a small child, perhaps your readers want to see dog in the photo – You know your audience a bit, use this tool to get to know them better.
