What Is The Best Approach, To Doing Email Testing?

Today, we’ll go through several methods for doing tests on your email marketing campaigns so that you can see results in hard numbers.

The purpose of each email test you do should be very clear. Do some self-analysis and ask yourself these questions: “Why am I sending this email for testing, and what am I hoping to achieve from it??”

You need to focus on data-driven analysis, these are the steps to take to improve your next message by using A/B testing in your email marketing.

How to test your emails so, that you can decide the best next steps in order to keep delivering value that your contacts that they will find useful.

A/B Testing

Prior to discussing the techniques, you’ll be following, let’s talk about a/b testing. When it comes to testing marketing emails, what exactly is it?

A/B testing is the incoming reaction to a controlled experiment. Email performance testing is the practice of testing out different things to discover which one outperforms the other.

An email A/B comparison is taking place between two versions of the same message. An A/B test can be used to discover the best version of your email. Rather than playing a guessing game, you will focus on data-driven analysis.

You can do an A/B test on your own, without using any tools, even though most email marketing systems include a built-in feature for it.

Comparing two versions of your email and seeing which one performs better is what an A/B test allows you to do. Afterward, you can review the results to determine which one outperformed the others and use that knowledge for future email campaigns.

Having established what A/B testing is, let’s move on to the steps you’ll need to do in order to put it to use in your marketing email campaigns.

Defining the goal and purpose of your test is the first stage in the process. It’s imperative that you secondly, segment the target audience for your message, thirdly construct a test and then forth evaluate and launch your test.

These are the first actions you should follow in order to generate A/B testing for your email and newsletter marketing campaigns. In addition to analyzing and reporting the results, now your responsibility is generating the A/B tests first and foremost.

Testing

Only test one part of the email at a time: the subject line, body content, or the CTA that you’re putting in place. Think of the tests you’re doing as experiments in which you’re trying to find a control and a variable to examine and evaluate.

Once you’ve figured this out, it’s time to get started on the test for your marketing emails.

The first step in a well-thought-out inbound strategy is to explicitly state why something is being done.

To get the most out of your testing, you need to be looking for data that will help you take action to improve your business. Testing your marketing emails on an ongoing basis may help you improve, but keep in mind that doing something simply for the sake of doing something will not generate significant results or bring value to the lives of those who receive your communications.

Your email campaigns should be analyzed to understand what you need to improve. It’s possible that the emails you’re sending aren’t having the desired effect. A rebranding effort may be underway and you’d want to experiment with new colors or logos. Before beginning on a testing adventure, make sure you have a clear purpose in mind.

All the while keeping this in mind, you’re able to take the first steps to prepare to design your email test.

What To Test

Take a look at all the email components you can change, for example.

The open rates can be affected by a number of different things. Some of the reasons for this may include the number of emails you send to your list, the subject line play a big part and even the preview text content. In addition, what variables may influence the number of people who actually Click-Through (CTR)? It’s critical to pay attention to the content of the email body, as well as its layout, visuals, and other elements like the call to action (CTA), and almost forgot to mention your email signature.

These aspects might serve as a starting point for narrowing your priorities plus, your Goal and purpose. To find out what’s doing well, you’ll need to look at the data and make a hypothesis on what needs to be tested and therefore improved.

Once you’ve decided on a goal and a purpose for your email test, you’ll need to segment the audience you’ll be speaking to. You cannot do an A/B test on an email until it has been sent to a certain number of recipients, and sending an email to this quantity is necessary for the test to be conclusive. Statistical magnitude enters the picture here.

In order to determine the sample size needed to get the right statistical magnitude testing, you must perform some math and determine how many people are on your email list.

In order to test a new subject line, you may send an email to five people and expect to get five answers. Even if you get three out of five people to accept the new subject line, you can’t be sure that the rest of your contacts will, too. More people must take part in order for the results to be statistically magnitude.

How Do You Determine The Number Of People To Test?

If you want to utilize an A/B testing tool, you’ll want a list of at least 1,000 contacts to get started. To whoever (segmented list) you plan to send a certain email message, this is the total number of people or contacts.

Using the 1,000 people on your contact list, you must decide on a percentage or sample size for your test before sending out the variation of your email.

When sending an email, you’ll have two versions: one that’s the original, the A email, and is your control, and the other that has had a change made to it, the B email. This is for whichever aspect of your email you’re working on, header, body text, subject line, ext…

A 50/50 split test for your email send is acceptable if you have less than 1,000 contacts to test. There will be two versions distributed, with one being given to 50% of your contacts, and the other 50% receiving Version B.

Is this your scenario: You want to send a message to 1,000 or more people, but you don’t know how to do it? Consequently, you must determine the sample size that will provide clear results in your research.

If you are utilizing the A/B Testing from GetResponce, you are able to split your comparison into a percentage of your list. It is up to you how much of each variety you want to send and how much you want to send.

Calculating the necessary sample size for a significance test may be done using GetResponse’s A/B testing. This will provide you with the numbers you need for the various sample sizes that you’ll be using in your research in order to come up with conclusive results.

Using this calculation, you can figure out how many people will get the control version, email A and the variant version, email B, of your email test.

Let’s have a better look at it together. 

This part has been copied straight from Getrespone, on how to use their system to run an A/B Test. Most all email autoresponder companies have their own way of performing an A/B test. And yes, I just so happen to love and use GetResponse. For what all you can do for the price, it’s awesome!

Further down I have added links to some other well-known and used autoresponder company’s A/B testing procedures.

Click the link for your own account GetResponce.

In order to create an A/B test using GetResonse:

1. Go to Email marketing>> A/B tests.

2. Click Create A/B test.

3. Provide your A/B test name – it will only be visible to you.

4. Select from and reply-to addresses.

5. Add your Subject line variants. You can test up to 5 different subject lines to check which one gets you the most opens. For example, you can try personalizing your subject line, adding emojis, or including an offer.

https://firstprincemarketing.com/

6. Select your recipients by clicking Add recipients.

7. Design your message by clicking Design message. For more on using the new editor visit this section.

8. Click Configure A/B test to set up how you want the test to run. You can use the slider to decide on the size of the testing group. You can test it with up to 50% of your recipients. Then select if you want us to send the message automatically to the rest of the group or if you’d rather do it manually. Next, decide what should be the winning factor (open rate or click rate) and after what time do you want the test to end. We will show you a quick summary of your test group. Once you’re done, click Save.

https://firstprincemarketing.com/

9. Click tracking will be enabled by default to see which contacts clicked your links. This will help you estimate engagement.

10. Select if you want to send clicks coming from the message as a source to Google Analytics.

11. Choose if you want to send the test immediately or at a scheduled time.

12. Now you can either save the message as a draft or start the A/B test.

Start A/B Test pic

What statuses can my message have?

  • Preparing – we are sending your message to the testing groups.
  • Scheduled – the message is scheduled for delivery.
  • Testing – we have sent the samples and are testing variants results.
  • Testing finished – the samples have been tested and the results are ready to choose the winner (if you’ve chosen to manually select the winner).
  • Sending winner – we are sending the winning message to the rest of the recipients.
  • Canceled – the message sending has been canceled by the user.
  • Completed – the test is completed and all the variants, as well as the winning message, have been sent and tested.
  • Draft – the message is a draft and is waiting for completion.

How do I choose the winning message and where can I see it?

If you selected to choose the winner manually, you can expand your A/B test and then choose the winner from the Actions menu (vertical ellipsis) by clicking Send as winner.

You will be able to see your winning message above the variants. There you will see how many messages were delivered after the test stopped and what was the open rate and click rate for it. You will also be able to check detailed statistics for this message.

Where can I see the statistics?

You can see your message statistics if you go to Email marketing>> A/B tests. There you will be able to see the overview results for the A/B test (delivered messages, overall open rate, overall click rate). Once you expand the section, you’ll get the results divided into 2 categories:

  1. Winner results.
  2. Variant results.

Each of them will have delivered messages, open rate, and click rate statistics.
In the statistics for each variant, we will only show the opens and clicks generated during the duration of the test. For example, if the testing period was 2 days, we will only show data collected during these 2 days, not in the following days after the test ended.
Winner results will include delivered messages, open rate, and click rate both from the testing period and after sending the winner.

For more statistics on the winner, you can click View Statistics.

Winner statistics

Let me thank GetResponse for that info.

Here are some links to some other well-known autoresponders out there.

Aweber.com A/B Test

Constantcontact.com A/B Test

Convertkit.com A/B Test

hubspot.com A/B Test

Once again here’s the link to join GetResponce.

Your Email Design

What you want to accomplish will have a significant impact on your design. The goal of your inbound approach should be tied directly to the content, purpose, or outcome that you’re wanting to generate.

You have identified areas needing improvement in your email, as part of the goal-setting process. Time to push things further and figure out what can be done to improve them.

Figuring out whether your solution is even feasible, is a key part of testing. Prevent sending any emails at all if you want to avoid getting unsubscribe requests. Isn’t this a fascinating study to take part in? LOL

That’s not true.

When hypothesizing, it’s crucial to be creative but also to keep your ideas grounded in reality.

Investing in testing that will pay off, in the long run, is very important to your business.

For example, let’s analyze the following hypotheses to see what kind of test you might come up with to verify them:

Consider the following example while establishing the purpose of your test: By performing a test, say you want to find a way to increase the open rates of your newsletter emails, which aren’t getting as many as you’d like.

Email newsletter opens should rise from 11% to 15% during the course of one business quarter.

Subject lines include characters and phrases that, based on your knowledge might trigger spam filters in the recipient’s email clients.

Exclamation points and percentage signs as well as sales-y terms like “free” and “discount” can be deleted from subject lines in order to test this theory. The subject line should be as relevant as possible to the content of your email. Your open rate can be improved by using these best practices, which you will want to test for.

Your poor open rates might be due to the following reasons, of sending too many emails. As a result, your contacts are less likely to open your emails. Do an evaluation of whether lowering your email frequency for at least one month increases open rates.

Review & Start The Test

This is how to relate your goal to your test design so, you can begin monitoring and optimizing email sends as shown below.

At long last, you may begin studying for the test. 😂Just a little joke. 😂

Finally, though.

You’ll want to go through and review your email, then begin the test.

Prior to moving on to the next step, you must first choose the length of time for which your test will be conducted.

Running your tests for a long period of time isn’t a magic number nor is there a perfect time of the week or even day of the month, but you want to make sure that enough of your contacts have time to interact with the email.

Within a certain time limit, some email A/B testing software will choose a winning email and distribute it to the remaining contacts on your list. The value of time cannot be emphasized in this context.

Your A/B test will not be statistically significant after an hour or even after 24 hours. When deciding on a time frame, think about how past performances have performed in the past (You Want To Focus On Data-Driven Analysis, Not Guesswork, my friend).

One of the most common blunders is to quit testing before it’s over. Not just the A/B test you’re doing right now, either. Before making any substantial change in the method you send emails, do a large number of tests to see how things are going.

Over the course of a few months and a few email campaigns, you may have opted to test a few different things. If you take look at those numbers, you’ll be able to see what needs to be changed for the moment.

When it comes to sending a single email, though, time is still an issue.

Opens & Clicks

Take a look at your email’s open rates and click-through rates to see where things begin to decline or increase.

What percentage of the total number of clicks did your email get on the first day it was sent? Your email A/B testing may be limited to just 24 hours. For example, if you found that it got 70% of clicks in the first 24 hours and then 5% each day after that, it would be a waste of time to postpone your findings in order to collect a tiny amount of extra data.

In this situation, wouldn’t it be prudent to limit yourself to a 24-hour window? Using an email platform with an A/B testing tool, the software will determine a statistically significant winner from the other alternatives. It’s possible that comparing the two types of emails’ conversion rates will help you determine which one is the winning email if your autoresponder company doesn’t.

But what happens if the test fails? For example, what would happen if the results were too close for statistical significance and neither version performed better than the other?

Your test was declared inconclusive if it yielded no statistically significant results for either variant. As a result, testing is very important. In order to make important choices about your emails, not all tests will provide you with the knowledge you need.

This might include altering your goals or paying greater attention to the numbers you’d want to change. In addition, you must test and retest your theories and assumptions. An effort is the only way to make progress, after all.

How Tests Are Performing

From this point on, you can see how well the tests are working. If you can’t figure out what needs to be changed, you could repeat the test many times.

Planning a test on your marketing emails can be as simple as following these steps. Prior to assessing and running your test

  • Determine Your Goals and Objectives
  • Evaluate Your Target Audience
  • Devise a Test Strategy
  • Run the Test.

If you follow these steps, you’ll see your company’s ability to do data-driven research by determining how your contacts respond to your marketing emails.

Get Started Today!!!

If your looking for an autoresponder to use for your business might I suggest GetResponce? “Warning: This is my affiliate link and I will probably earn a commission. But this is who we use ourselves and why we recommend them. 5⭐’s

Needing A Little Help?

If you find yourself needing a little help with your email marketing campaigns or you would like First Prince Marketing to handle your email marketing campaigns for your business? Please give us a try before you pull your hair out or after. LOL