You’ve planned. You’ve sketched. You’ve design and developed. You even made sure that your email visitors received a “red carpet entry” to your website by creating a crisp landing page. But for some reason, you aren’t 100% sold on that call-to-action button or are wondering if your audience is going to love your buzz-worthy subject line. Don’t fret! Like a good accessory, A/B testing can help you determine what elements are working overtime to make you look good and get you the conversions you want in your email campaign.
What Should You Test?
There are so many things you can test. Copy, images, length – the list goes on and on. The key take away from A/B tests is to keep it simple, sister! To keep your test conclusive, you will want to stick to one of the following ideas. Keeping your test specific will help you understand what worked and will lead you to your second split test.
Optimizing Subject Lines: Snazzy or sophisticated? Personalized or generic? If you are tempted to test the waters and see if something a little out of the ordinary would work for your audience, do an A/B test. Split your audience and send half of them the snazzy, less than ordinary subject line versus the one that is more of your MO. Did you know that personalized subject lines are 22% more likely to be opened? Food for thought! (Adestra Subject Line Report, 2012)
Your Elevator Pitch: You can’t just stop at a subject line with emails. Now, more than ever, when someone is looking at their email on their phone, they see the sender, subject and a preview of the message, called the pre-header text. This is your chance to grab their attention after your subject line, so think about a quick and concise way to tell them what your message is about. Being creative here is great, but don’t try things for a short gain. Stating, “Meet Tim Gunn from Project Runway!” in the pre-header might get you a ton of opens, but when they realize it was just a ploy to get them to open your email, you’ll loose credibility and have lousy click through rates.
The Bling Effect: Ah, the click through. While keeping it simple is always best, there are so many different aspects to make it pop in your email. Language, length, photography or button. How did a single element become so complicated to test?! Well, start simple with a test that surrounds placement, style (color, size, font) and wording. What would happen if you said “Register Today” vs. “Join in Our Fight”? What if you put that call to action in multiple places in your email for more click opportunities? Doing an A/B test on that call to action can help you clarify what speaks to your audience and gets them to take action. And remember, keep plenty of whitespace around that call to action to call attention to it.
As you can see, with just these 3 ideas, the options are limitless! But keep in mind the main reason why you want to do A/B testing: to test! Testing is extremely essential to any campaign. It will help you test the waters on new ideas or techniques to make a bigger impact for your email conversions. So whatever you decide to do in your test, keep it simple and complimentary to your campaign. A/B testing will help you get concrete evidence as to what will work for your audience and make you realize how to convert those click throughs to actual registrations and donations on your site. Good luck, have fun and keep testing to ‘make it work’ for your audience!
Are you ready to tackle a responsive email campaign but feeling a bit overwhelmed by all of the options and details? Let us help you! Our team of designers, developers and strategists can help get you from concept to conversions in no time flat. Send an email to info@charitydynamics.com to get the conversation started today!