A/B Testing Your Email Campaign, and How To Set It Up on Engage

Email marketing has proved to be a powerful tool businesses use to connect with their audience, build relationships, retain customers, and drive sales. However, creating effective email campaigns does go beyond crafting a catchy subject line, email copy, and hitting send button.

Most time you need to be sure your email resonates with your audience and does what you intend it to do( meet your campaign goal).

You’ve sometimes been lucky by just following your intuition on what your subject line or email copy or call to action should be.—making decisions without any backed-up factual reasoning or data other than that “it just feels or looks right.”

The truth is, you can’t always be lucky!

The only way to find out what email will appeal to the majority of your target audience is to put it to the test.

That is where Email A/B testing comes in.

On Engage, you can send personalized messages to your customers via email, SMS, push notifications, in-app messaging, and live chat.

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In this blog post, we will discuss

1. What is A/B Testing?
2. Email A/B testing best practices.
3. How to set up Email A/B testing on Engage.
4. Conclusion.

What is A/B Testing?

A/B testing is a valuable email marketing technique that marketers use to optimize their email marketing efforts by testing different elements of their email campaigns to determine what resonates best with their audience.

It’s the fastest way you can use as a marketer to figure out how your audience will react to your email and what they like so you can optimize the email campaigns accordingly.

In other words, it statistically helps you prove which email campaign will bring you the most success.

Most marketers skip email A/B testing because they don’t know how to go about it, or what to test or maybe they don’t have the right tools.

If you fall into any of these categories, then this is you, read on.

Email A/B testing is easier than you think, especially if you have the right tool like Engage which gives you a huge opportunity to improve your email campaigns.

As I mentioned, A/B split testing is just a way of testing, evaluating, and comparing two things in your email campaign.

Marketers carry out Email A/B tests to get answers to questions like:

• Which Email subject line will give the best open rates?
• Which button or call to action (CTA) makes people want to click?
• What imagery in your email drives better conversions
• What preheader text generates the best open rate
• What senders name will want user want to open the email
• What email copy will resonate with the audience
• Does adding emoji to the subject line increase the open rate

These and more are some of the questions that you can get answers to when you A/B test your email campaign.

With email A/B tests you can improve your email marketing metrics, increase conversions, get to know your audience, and find out what’s generating sales.

Email A/B Testing Best Practices

Email A/B testing can be time-consuming, and energy-sapping. If you’re just getting started with A/B testing or consider yourself a pro,  there are a few best practices to keep in mind to make testing your email marketing program a little much easier.

Here are some of the best practices to follow

1. Define clear goals: Before carrying out an A/B test on your email, first, clearly identify and define what you want to achieve with your test. Are you trying to improve your email open rates, click-through rates, conversions, or engagement, having a specific goal will help you know what to test and also measure your test success effectively.
2. Test a single variable at a time: To accurately measure the impact of a specific change on your email campaign, it is best to focus on testing one variable at a time. Whether it's the subject line, sender name, call-to-action, or email copy, identify the element you want to test and keep other variables consistent.
3. Consider Segmenting your audience: You can never go wrong with segmenting your audience based on relevant criteria such as demographics, location, or past interactions they had with your product. Segmenting your users allows you to tailor your A/B tests to those specific segments so you can get better insights into what resonates with each segment.
4. Test a significant sample size: Ensure that you test with a significant sample size to help you draw reliable conclusions. A small sample may not provide accurate insights. In other words, to run a valid A/B test, the larger the sample size, the better
5. Monitor Your Key Performance metrics: Remember the goal you set at the beginning? It’s important to an eye on those key performance metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and unsubscribe rates. This will help you to analyze the results of your A/B tests based on these metrics to determine which variation won.

How To Set Up Email A/B Testing On Engage

Step 1

To create an Email A/B test. Click on “campaign” on the Engage dashboard and click on “email” to create a new email campaign.

You can decide to test the following parameters for your email campaign:

(a) Your Email Subject

(b) The Sender’s name

(c) The Email Copy

Step 2

Select your winning strategy and percentage recipient

Step 3

Fill in the necessary information and click on “next”

Step 4

Select Recipients

Step 5

Preview and click on done editing

Step 6

You can send a test to yourself and other team members

Step 7

Once you are satisfied with the email, you can then send your email campaign.

You can check your test result from the dashboard after the scheduled time.

Subject Test Result

Email Content Test Result

Sender Test Result

Conclusion

Engage is a powerful customer engagement platform that helps marketing and customer success teams use the insight from their customer data to increase revenue and improve customer loyalty.

On Engage, you can send personalized messages to your customers via email, SMS, push notifications, in-app messaging, and live chat.

Get Started For Free