A/B Email Testing: Best Practices
You want your email campaigns to have a high click-through rate and a low unsubscribe rate. So when you send out two variant emails, you can learn which approach results in the most positive response. This is known as A/B email testing.
Armed with A/B testing data, you can send the most effective version out to your remaining recipients for maximum impact.
The key takeaway of conducting an A/B email test is determining the most effective email version that drives action from your constituents.
Test a granular change
The best approach when building a variant is to change only one aspect of the email. Changing more than one aspect makes it unclear as to which change affected the response of the audience.
Some areas to vary include:
Subject line: Perhaps add personalization to one subject line, and have no personalization in the original message. Perhaps put a call to action in one of your subject lines
"From" Name and "From" Address: Change the name and email address of the sender
Design: Perhaps change images, link placement, or bolding
Content: Is your call to action clear? Would a headline be effective?
Timing of delivery: Does the send time or day impact the open rate?
Incentive: Will a special offer result in higher response?
Send to a small subset of your audience
After you create the original and variant emails, set up your A/B split test delivery. You have two options to get started.
You can:
Find your message and its variants in the list of messages in the Messages tab of your campaign, and click A/B Test in the Actions column
Click Run A/B Test in the left-hand column of the Messages tab
Next, you will enter the number of test emails to send. The most effective use is to start with a small portion of a larger audience. You can enter a number between 1 and 10,000.
Do not send your email variants to the entire audience of your campaign. This defeats the purpose of the test. Instead, test on a small audience, then take the results and apply them to the mass send.
Where can I see the test results?
Use the Variant Performance Report to compare two (or more) variants within the same report. Run this report from the Reports tab in the Email Campaign module.