When it comes to email marketing, it is crucial to be able to understand what your audience wants and how they might react. In order to move your audience along to the next stage of the customer journey, you must create an effective email campaign that entices users to engage further - and that’s where A/B testing comes in handy!

Successful email marketing campaigns require some constructive input, like A/B testing, to help uncover the most effective assets & tactics that will help your users engage and ultimately convert. Using these types of tests allows you to create data-driven email marketing campaigns and improve your deliverability, eliminating any guesswork involved in what drives engagement from your audience.

How does A/B testing work in email marketing?

Otherwise known as split testing, A/B testing is essentially an experiment that compares 2 variables of your email campaign by sending individual versions of an email to a segmented audience, these can include:

• Subject line
• Headline
• Length of content
• Email layout
• Personalisation
• Images
• CTA’s (Call To Action)
• Landing page design

Your audience will view your emails on different devices like a laptop, tablet or mobile, therefore it’s important to control as many variables as possible when running an A/B test. This will create more accurate, rich results. When carrying out an A/B test, you split a segment of your audience into 2 groups, one of which will receive version 1 and the other will receive version 2.

Best practice is to aim to test about 10% of your entire list. Once you determine the winning variant, this can be sent to the remaining 90% which will help to drive more suitable engagement, better reactions, higher revenue and increased return on investment based on the data gathered during the test.

Other benefits of A/B testing include conversion rate optimisation, as it allows you to collate a range of user insights such as behaviour, potential pain points and whether or not your overall marketing strategy is being received well by its target audience.

Key takeaways from A/B testing

What can you get out of email A/B testing? It’s a great experimental tool for helping you understand the impact of your subject lines on email open rates as well as how the use of emojis can impact user engagement 🤔

The buttons you use within an email can make quite the difference, so it’s good to also see how different buttons help or hinder actions being taken.

A hugely important part of an email campaign is imagery, and how people feel about an image or graphic can be shown through their engagement. Even testing how large that image is (in dimensions not file size) and how that impacts how much a user scrolls past the image.

Ready to launch a data-driven email strategy?

Driving good quality engagement with your existing audience is crucial, after all retaining existing customers is much cheaper than acquiring new ones. When sending an email campaign, it’s important to ensure there is a clear action for users to take such as learn more, shop now, or explore, otherwise it can be misleading or offer a negative user experience. Each negative experience that existing customers face results in increased friction and frustration with the brand, which ultimately impacts the conversion rate.

From big to small changes to your email marketing strategy, even the smallest improvements make for a great impact! If you’re looking for an email marketing agency in Glasgow, speak to Mucky Puddle - we offer an array of digital marketing services, including email marketing, automations and so much more to help you streamline your marketing offering.