One of the great things about the online space is the availability of metrics and the ability to test different elements. There is no exception with email marketing. Even if your campaign is relatively small, and regardless of if you are a B2B or B2C marketer, testing can help improve the success of your program.
In a previous post I commented on a nice subject line from Blinds.com. A/B Subject line testing is usually the quickest place to start of you are new to email marketing testing, and one of the easiest tests to have in place if you are already running more complex testing programs.
The concept is simple: Test 2 or more different versions of your subject line to see what performs better.
To keep it simple, let’s assume we are using the open rate (number of opened emails/number of delivered emails) as the metric of determining a ‘winner.’ Let’s also assume we are sending to a list of 50,000 subscribers.
Let’s do a sample of 7,500 for each for 2 subject lines, and then roll the winner out to the remaining 35,000 subscribers after 2 days. The diagram below shows this scenario:
In my own testing, I’ve seen everything from near microscopic differences (15.04% vs 15.06%) to significant winners (12% vs. 30%). See how your lists perform under a testing scenario. The larger the list, the greater the impact of even a small improvement. With email marketing, we want to systematically make improvements to all of our key metrics. While one may be more important than the other, they all play an important role in the success of our campaign.
- Forest Bronzan
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