Having A Plan When You’re A/B Testing Your Emails

You’ve probably never heard us mention the idea of testing before (just kidding, you totally have), but it’s an integral part of providing a unique experience for your subscribers. But you can’t just go into an A/B test all willy-nilly.

No, you need to have plan. Which is what we’re precisely going to help you lay the groundwork for. Right now. You’re welcome!

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What Results Do You Want?

In the broad sense of the question, we know what results you want: To get more clicks that lead to more revenue. But we want you to think smaller: What is it you hope to learn from doing this test? Do your subscribers respond better to emails with or without pictures? Do they like humorous copy, or do they want you to get to the point already?

Writing out your testing objectives is the first step to properly running an A/B test.

Testing The Objectives

So once we have those written out it’s time to make them actionable — just like those questions above. Will more subscribers click the CTA if the copy made them laugh? Will the emails see more opens if the subject lines are shorter? Stuff like that.

Once we’ve turned our objectives into testable questions, it’s time to A/B test.

Learning From The Results

So you’ve done your A/B test — now it’s time to review the results. When you’ve got it all in front of you, make sure to really dig in. Don’t just take the winner at face value — really analyze the numbers. This is key to moving forward because the tests don’t end here, and really great email marketers are always testing and always progressing their email programs forward off of the varying results.

A Tool To Check Out

IsValid is a fun little tool you can play around with to help with your A/B testing. Or, if all that sounds like a lot of work, well, hey — we’ve got a great email agency that can do it all for you.

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Also check out 3 Things To Test For Besides The Subject Line and Subject Line Testing: 5 Things To Keep In Mind.