Optimize Your Strategy With A/B Testing
MAR 2024
By Alexis Woerdehoff
In the world of email marketing, your program's success ultimately depends on more than enticing content and eye-catching designs - it's about understanding your audience, learning so you’re able to refine your approach, and constantly striving to see improvement within your program. That's where A/B testing comes into play.
In this, we’re going to dive deeper into A/B testing and why you should use it to optimize, not just your campaigns, but your entire program.
Get Into The Ins & Outs Of Testing
Why Does A/B Testing Even Matter? It’s simple: A/B testing gives data-driven results to help understand your audience and what resonates best with them.
What Should You Test? Anything and everything. The options are endless with what you can test, such as subject lines, CTAs, design elements, and even send times. Testing these individual factors will help you gain insight into what resonates best with your audience.
How Should You Go About A/B Testing? Develop a plan, create a hypothesis, and test one element at a time! By systematically testing different elements of your emails one at a time, it will give you concrete results, while if you tested multiple elements at the same time, it can skew the results. We also recommend testing each element at least 5+ times for campaigns and at least 2 weeks for flows to track results and come to a data-backed conclusion. Win-confidence and audience size should factor into how many times you test.
What To Do With Your Results
Optimize & Improve! You ran these tests and tracked the results, so now it’s time to take action on them. A/B testing gives you the power to refine and optimize your email design, strategies, and program as a whole. When you’re able to identify what works best with your specific subscriber base and what doesn't work, you can better target weaknesses and strengths, ultimately driving stronger engagement and conversions throughout your program.
Real World Examples
For Fluency client, Rejuvica Health, we had a theory that brighter-colored emails would resonate best with their subscribers and increase CTR, which would also lead to higher revenue. We started testing brighter vs. more neutral colors and have seen in early testing, the brighter colors have driven more clicks and revenue.
For Bombshell Sportswear, another Fluency client, the hypothesis was that MMS would drive higher conversion rates than SMS. What we found was that the SMS had more clicks in the first hour and MMS saw fewer clicks, but since subscribers saw a preview of the drop in the MMS, those clicking through had a higher intent to purchase - which drove a higher CVR.
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