A/B Split Testing

In case you are not a digital or email marketing specialist – A/B testing also known as split testing, compares two versions of the same campaign on a certain channel. These channels include, but are not limited to:

  • Website
  • Social Media
  • Emails
  • Mobile Apps
  • Landing Pages
  • Digital Advertisements

In reality, A/B testing increases customer engagement, improves campaign effectiveness, and enlightens marketers about audience preferences. By evaluating the behaviours of buyers, A/B testing reveals what truly appeals to them. In doing so, it also advances consumer engagement, campaign effectiveness and marketer expertise.

Here are the 5 top best practices for testing and improving your email marketing strategy:

  1. Keep it simple. Testing simple elements like subject lines, from first name/last name and email copy. It is less time consuming testing these and being creative with simple test is the way forward for success.
  2. Standardise email send times. When running any split test, be sure to normalise your email broadcast times. Changes in the timing of just 30 minutes can significantly change the results of your test. Therefore, making sure email is broadcast together at an optimal time for your audience is key.
  3. Pick your sample sizes wisely. If your sample size is not significant enough, you may end up choosing a winner without actually having one. By best practice, it’s advisable to have at least 1,000 observations for any test. For example, when running a subject line test, you need at least 1,000 opens per email to get the statistical significance. If you can’t find significance, you would need to run the test again and aggregate the data.
  4. Best to test one element at a time. As a good rule of thumb, testing one variable at a time is the best way to go unlike having the thought that testing various elements would have more impact and to drive improvement. This is a big No No! By testing one variable at a time, measuring the results, and rolling out the winners into your new emails over time is the best way to driving improvement in your email marketing strategy.
  5. Check your test results. There are likely to be some test results that makes no sense at all. The finest, most engaging email might not be the cutest or your favourite but trust the data and your email results will be awesome!

I hope this blog has helped give you some split testing ideas as well as a foundation for how to test and measure your email results.

Stay connected by subscribing to my blogs, and follow my tweets @gmfrem.