What is A/B testing in email marketing?
A/B testing, also known as split testing, is a research method to discover which two campaign options is the most effective in terms of encouraging opens or clicks.
To test this, you select a contact group that you divide in two. The first subset of subscribers receives campaign variation A, and the second subset receives campaign variation B. After testing which variation gives you the best results, the best variation is sent to the rest of your subscribers.
3 good reasons to A/B test your email campaigns
A/B testing your email campaigns has a multitude of benefits - we will share the 3 best reasons why you should A/B test.
1. Better open rates
A/B testing the subject line of your email campaigns is an effective way to improve the open rates of your emails. What is the ideal length of your subject line, in which order should you place your copy in the subject line, who is the emails sender or how can your subject line stand out visually? These are just some questions to test to try to improve the open rates of your email campaigns. Remember, you can always A/B test only one of the examples at the same time. Otherwise the A/B test will not give you representative results.
2. Increased click-through-rates
A/B testing the content of your email campaigns is a great way to increase click-through-rates (CTR). There are multiple parameters that influence the CTR. Good examples are testing different call-to-action-buttons, personalization tags, tones of voice, copy lengths and even email templates.
3. Higher conversion rates
Finally, A/B testing your email campaigns can lead to higher conversion rates. If your emails are opened more often and clicked on more frequently, chances are that A/B testing your emails leads to higher conversion rates as well. By testing for example different color blocks, anchor texts and copy which leads to an increased click-through rate, this might increase the number of contact requests that convert your subscribers from readers to leads.
Test your emails with the Mobile Marketing Cloud
Now that you know what A/B testing in email marketing is, why it is important, and what are elements you can test, you must be itching to get started right away.
You can start A/B testing immediately with CM.com’s Mobile Marketing Cloud. Within this cloud you’ll find CM.com’s Email Campaigns which is the perfect tool to easily test and send your email campaigns straight away.
What is so great about the Mobile Marketing Cloud, is that it doesn't just allow you to send and test your email campaigns, but also has a Customer Data Platform (CDP). In the CDP, all customer data and interactions are combined to create rich customer profiles. This makes it easy to build segments by filtering on every possible profile property. This allows you to create segments for your email campaigns as well. What’s more, it allows you to create segments to use as subsets of your subscribers to send different email variations to.
Best of all, is that the Mobile Marketing Cloud is completely mobile focused - the perfect tool for all your mobile marketing activities.