Email Marketing Best Practices: Your A/B Testing

In email marketing, there's always room for improvement. An adjustment here, a tweak there - it's the minor calibrations that can make all the difference in your open and click-through rates. Simply by changing your subject line, you could increase your open rates by 5 - 10%. Or, by changing the day of the week you send your email marketing newsletters, you could increase your sales by as much as 70%!

Next time you decide to use the split testing method, commonly called A/B testing, take some different variables into consideration. Here are a few ways you can test to ensure email marketing success:

Landing Pages
Don't over-promise and under-deliver. In other words, if you think your landing page has nothing to do with your email newsletter, you've got another thing coming. The perfect email is, quite frankly, a waste if your landing page can't seal the deal. Test all the same things you would in your email marketing newsletters on your landing pages. Placement and content are important elements here.

Placement Options
So you've got a bangin' call-to-action. Great, now you need to put it where it will be seen. A good rule of thumb is: the higher on the email the better, and then, sprinkled throughout. Also, try different placement options for your navigation. What works best - left, right, or top center? Play around with positioning in different html email marketing templates. Subtle differences can have a drastic effect on campaign success.

Visuals
Testing visuals could be a waste of time unless you're comparing two dramatically different email marketing templates. Just testing images or background colors won't yield much of a difference. If you've been using the same template for a while, try tossing another one into the mix to see how it compares to the status quo. (And, by the way, there shouldn't BE many status quos when it comes to email marketing solutions! As long as you're working with first-rate email marketing software that has more features than a Deluxe Swiss Army knife, change should be your only constant.)

Content
Experiment not only with different keywords and calls-to-action, but different tones and personalities as well. Do your subscribers prefer straight-forward tech talk or a little quirkiness and humor? Also, play around with length - do shorter articles do the trick or do your readers want more?

Scheduling
No matter how epic your email marketing newsletter, if it hits inboxes on the wrong day of the week, it could spell disaster for your results. In your A/B lab, test different days AND times until you find that "happy place".