Marketing isn’t just about the glitz and glamour of creative ideas and inventive campaigns. If you want to guarantee success in your next campaign, you have to do more than think creatively – you need to strategise. Cramming your copy with clever wordplay and allowing alliteration to augment your next announcement might be fun to create but if you want content that converts you’ve got to find out what your audience is going to engage with.
That’s where A/B testing comes in.
What is A/B Testing?
Sometimes called split testing, A/B testing is the process of comparing two versions of your marketing content by showing them to two groups within the same audience. These two versions have specific elements changed so you can see which parts of your content are more likely to get your audience to engage or convert.
From emails, to ads, to blog posts, to your entire website, within digital marketing, there are so many ways you can test different aspects of your content to see how successful they will be with your audience. And plenty of CRMs and CMSs have built in processes to help you test out different content with the same audiences.
Since it’s our bread and butter – and something you can do RIGHT NOW – let’s take a look at how A/B testing works for emails.
A/B Testing with Emails
There are several factors that your CRM will track that dictate the success of an email: deliverability, open rate, click rate, unsubscribes and a few you can track yourself, traffic to your website, engagement of that traffic, meetings booked in, or conversion rates.
And all of those measurable factors are impacted by things completely within your control. From the subject line, to the main copy, to the call-to-action, to who the email is being sent from, to who’s receiving it... all these seemingly small details can end up having a big impact on the success of an email. And the best way to find out what works for your audience, is to consistently try new things, analyse the insights you gather, and apply those insights in the future.
No two businesses are the same, and there’s not one thing a marketing expert can teach you that will make your email convert cold prospects into hot leads or even customers – if there was, we’d have one article on our website called The Perfect Combination of words to use to get 100% opens and clicks on your email.
However, we do have the next best thing – click here to read nine high-performing subject lines you can try now.
Even when compared to your direct competitor – your brand voice, your audience, your team and YOU can all set your organisation apart significantly. Even with all the marketing skills in the world, without testing to see what works with your audience, you won’t ever truly know how great your marketing could be.
You might send emails out and average an impressive 50% open rate – nothing to scoff at – but do you really know what part of those emails your audience are engaging with? Not without A/B testing you don’t.
A/B Testing Best Practices
You can start A/B testing tomorrow, but make sure you keep in mind our A/B Testing Best Practices to make sure the effort isn’t being wasted.
1. Go big…
Which email would you rather open? One with the subject line: Did you see this? or one with the subject line: Have you seen this?
You probably don’t have a preference, right? Because at the end of the day these small changes mean very little to you and to your audience. Changing the subject line is important, but shifting the entire tone of the sentence or adding a significant element like the recipient’s first name or an emoji could make a difference.
And it’s the same once they’ve opened your email. Would a button that says “Click here” get more clicks a button that says “Find out more”. Maybe, but why not try a more fundamental change – instead of “Click here”, what if it said “Start your journey” or “Change your business”? You might start to realise your audience wants to engage with new ideas rather than see them same-old messaging.
But that doesn’t mean you have to start changing everything about an email.
2. Stay sharp
A/B testing doesn’t mean sending out two completely different emails about two completely different topics, to two completely different audiences. The sledgehammer approach can have its uses, but it doesn’t give you proper insight into what works and what doesn’t. You need to find something to learn from.
From changing the subject line to changing the call to action, or maybe even changing the sender’s name, these small changes can still have a big impact on deliverability and open rates. So find changes that you can gain real insight from and don’t switch them all at once.
3. Know what you want to know
A/B testing is a science – and if you want to gain insights, you have to know what you’re looking for. Changing things “just to see what happens” or “in case it has an impact” might lead you to see different results, but you’re much better approaching with an idea in mind.
“Will our audience engage more if we use casual language?” or “Does personalising emails have more of an impact on clicks?” By thinking of a question and using A/B testing to get your answer, you can start approaching the WHY with a smarter outlook.
Does your audience engage more with casual language because it stands out from what they’re used to or because they aren’t the stuffed shirt, corporate types you thought they were?
By having an idea in mind and using A/B testing to gather evidence for or against it, you’ll get better, more actionable insights. And speaking of better insights…
4. ABBA Testing
Mamma Mia, here we go again – using A/B testing to get a grasp on what works and what doesn’t can give you great insights, but when you split your database in half – whether you’ve got 500 contacts in it or 50,000 contacts – you will find that biases exist on both sides.
So how can you make sure your findings aren’t influenced by those biases? ABBA Testing!
This is when you send your A message to one half of your audience and your B message to the other, then – keeping them split – send another email with the same changes you made to the B message to the half you sent the original A message to and vice versa.
It’s not a perfect solution – if you’re only making small changes, you don’t want to repeatedly bombard an audience with almost identical content. But it will help you see whether the insights you get are repeatable across your entire audience rather than just half of it.
The more you test, the more accurate the insights.
5. Don’t get complacent
Repeating tests is a great way to get insights, but it’s also important to remember that things change. Whether it’s you and your business changing or your audience, you can’t guarantee that what you know about your content and how your prospects engage with it will stay the same.
This means keep trying new things (and keep retrying old things). It’s not about what works, it’s about what works for YOUR audience NOW. In the digital world, new trends and the ease at which content can be shared mean what works one year might be old news the next – so you have to stay on top of your content to keep things fresh and engaging for your audience.
A good marketing strategy means balancing creativity with smart, strategic thinking. The line between what’s working well and what’s not working at all might be blurry, but by committing the time and effort it takes to test all the content your audience will interact with, from ads, to emails, to your website, you can find out what works best.