Whether you have a booming business with 100,000 email contacts or a fledgling business with a tiny email list, your email deliverability is one of the most important marketing metrics to keep track of. If you’re someone who’s contacting your customers on a regular basis, ensuring your business has a healthy email deliverability rate is key to your success.
The more your audience opens and clicks on your email campaigns, the more likely your emails are to end up in their inbox. This is why it’s so important to understand what email strategies resonate most with your audience by using the three email testing ideas you’ll soon learn about in this blog.
One of the best ways to get to know your audience and what they’re most likely to click on is by split testing your emails. In this blog post, you’ll learn three email testing ideas that’ll help you better understand your audience and in turn, boost your overall deliverability.
What Is Split Testing?
Also known as A/B testing, Split testing is the process of creating two nearly identical email campaigns with minor differences, such as a slightly different subject line or different calls to action. When you split test an email, you send both versions to your audience to see which garners more openings and clicks.
One way to split test your emails is to play around with different subject lines. For example, if 10 percent of your audience opens the email with Subject A, while 20 percent opens the email with Subject B, then you know your customers are most interested in the latter. This email test can give you valuable insight into the type of content your audience best responds to.
Therefore, split testing your email campaigns is the best way to improve your email deliverability. In this blog, you’ll learn about three email testing ideas, including your subject line, call to action and email send time.
Three Ways to Split Test Your Email
Email Testing Ideas: Your Subject Line
The subject line is a good place to begin. Your email’s subject line is the very first thing anyone sees when you email them. It’s what makes your email stand out from the rest of the messages in an inbox. That being said, it makes sense to test out a few different types of subject lines to see which your audience prefers.
You can start by switching up your words, icons, and phrasings, such as using an inquisitive subject line or something more direct. The more subject lines you test in your emails, the more you’ll understand what catches your audience’s eye.
Email Testing Ideas: Your Call To Action
The next email testing idea is your call to action. Your call to action is the button or link you want your audience to click on after they open and read your email. In other words, it’s the action you hope your reader will take after reading your message. Most of the time, your call to action will be a link to your website, such as to your blog or sales page.
There are a few ways you can test your email’s call to action. You can switch between in-text links, long URLs, or buttons. You can also change up the fonts, colors, and sizes to see which your audience is most receptive to. Consistently testing your call to actions will help you understand the best way to direct your email subscribers to your website, sales page, or blog.
Email Testing Ideas: Your Email Send Time
The final component to test with split testing is email send time. People typically keep their email send times fairly consistent. That’s because choosing a specific time and day to send out your newsletter lets your audience know when to expect it.
However, changing up your send times is a great email testing idea to understand when you’re audience is most active.
ActiveCampaign allows you to easily test your email send times by split testing your newsletters and campaigns. It even offers something called predictive sending, which identifies the best send time for a specific contact. Testing your send time is another really great way to help improve your overall email deliverability, and ensure your emails are arriving in your subscribers’ inboxes.
A Few Things To Remember When Split Testing Your Emails
While split testing is a great way to improve your deliverability, it’s important to keep a few considerations in mind when running through these email testing ideas.
First, you want to make sure you’re only ever running one test at a time. If you change more than one aspect of your email for a test, it’ll be difficult to pinpoint exactly what change outperformed the other. Making one small change — such as linking different texts in a paragraph — can bring about more successful results.
You’ll also want to run these tests with a decently sized audience to ensure you’re getting enough traffic for accurate results. The idea is to run the same test over a week or two to see what change wins out, then move onto the next.
My final advice: Be patient! It’s important to know that split testing your emails takes time. And it’s OK to completely mess up. Sometimes you’ll have an amazing email testing idea, only to find that the test completely failed. That’s really just a part of the process. You have to be willing to make mistakes in order to improve your results.
I want to hear from you!
Are you currently split testing? If you are, what results do you see? If you aren’t split testing, what is stopping you from doing so? Let me know in the comments below!
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