Posted by As a modern marketer, there are millions of demands available on your time, and testing the email marketing campaigns you have might most of the time end up relegated to the last part of your list.
However, testing doesn’t have to be time-consuming, right? The opportunities you can uncover to enhance and optimize your results will be priceless.
In our 6 Amazing Email Testing Tricks Article, we’ll break down six email tests you must run right now and guarantee high conversion rates! Plus, we’ve shared some common tips for testing.
Some deep knowledge for email marketers:
- Email Marketing Automation: The Complete Guide
- Email Marketing Analytics Guide
- How Email Reputation Is Calculated + How To Fix It
- Best Customer Relationship Marketing Strategies
6 Amazing Email Testing Tricks: High Conversion Guaranteed
Why to test?
Testing permits you to compare & contrast numerous elements of the email campaigns you have to indicate how they affect your subscribers’ reactions to them. Forming a hypothesis is possible about what you think will happen, and after that, formulate a test and indicate what really happens.
As an example, you might not be thrilled with your email campaign click-through rates or you want to enhance them. In case previous noticed that some of your click-through rates were plateauing, so you must decide to run some tests to monitor if you’re able to boost them up. You can also use the Dynamic Content feature to enhance the click-throughs.
With the help of simple segmentation and custom imagery, which appealed to each person recipient of the email, you can get up to a 15% increase rate in click-throughs and drive thousands of additional visitors to the content in your campaign.
This lift in click-throughs will prompt you to test even extra things, and you can run an A/B test of a fresh design in your blog and subscribers’ email against the old one. Guess what? According to research, you’ll get 131% lift in click-throughs only by using a greater visually appealing design.
As you read, implementing tests in your email marketing, you can gain a ton of actionable insights that can directly affect the performance of the campaigns you have. Now, let’s get into the six elements of email testing you should be doing.
Golden tip!
You know what, there’s a proven method of increasing the email conversion rate. You have to filter the Email list and target just the real ones. That don’t just decrease the chances of getting your Email spammed, but also increase overall conversion! Do use an email verifier, and never feel lethargic, when a free trial is on offer!
6 testing elements for your email campaign
Now that you understand the advantages of testing your email campaigns, let’s uncover six aspects of testing, which you can implement in your emails right now to get better results:
1.) Email subject line testing
Subject lines might be the most commonly tested element in emails. However, it’s essential testing too. Some useful testable things you can try in your emails’ subject lines include:
- Length – Try testing short subject lines versus longer subject lines (this topic is the most debatable in the email marketing world)
- Promotion/Offer – See what type of promotion works perfectly by offering “Free Shipping” or “15% Off”
- Topic – Test two entirely different topics as the subject line, to indicate what content is of the most interest to your subscribers
- Personalization – Try adding personalization to identical subject lines to know whether the first name greeting gets a better response or not.
2.) Email Pre-header testing
Do you currently pre-header in the email campaigns you have? The pre-header text is basically the first line of text in the email and will serve as the wingman to the email subject line offering greater context to your subscribers regarding what the email is about. This is also helpful in the email browsers’ preview pane. Most marketers overlook the opportunity, which pre-header presents to assist and enhance the open rate.
Now, some fascinating things you can try out in your pre-header test are:
- Content – You can include a couple of topics in your pre-header and just watch out which one of both caught subscribers respond more.
- Inclusion – Test including two pre-headers rather than one and check out whether the version with the pre-header reflects a higher open rate.
3.) Day or time
Among the most frequent questions in email marketing we receive is what’s the perfect time/day to send an email. Well, different companies and analysis come up with different numbers and recommendations? As marketers ourselves, we’ll say, “It depends.”
You can’t call that a cop-out.
As every business possesses a different level of engagement, a different list, and undoubtedly, different content, so, how can the answer be uniform for all?
Testing the day and time you send your email certainly can be a sweet chance to conclude what works best for your email list by analyzing the change in your CTRs or open rates.
In case you’re the one sending your newsletter on Monday, just try sending it on Wednesday and observe what happens and whether it brought some benefit of not. Or, might you always send your newsletter at 11 am. What would happen if you send a couple of hours later at 1 p.m?
4.) Call to action
Now, the big question is – are your calls to action really receiving the sort of action they deserve? Secondly, we’d ask you, “when did you test yours the last time?
Some fascinating things you can try out in your call-to-action tests are:
- Color – Your call-to-action needs to complement the rest portion of your email and still stand out. That’s not as confusing as you are assuming right now. Test out some contrasting colors to figure out which colors receive the best response. Our buddies at Unbounce found orange to be their winning color.
- Copy – You can experiment generic call-to-action copy. For Example, “Buy More” vs. something more specific copy such as “Get the Hara Jeans Now.” Recently, we’ve also done numerous A/B tests and compared advantage-focused copy to generic copy. Surprisingly, each time the advantage-focused copy’s click-through rates increased by about 10%, and that’s amazing.
5.) Email Content Testing
We all might have read a few million times – content is king. However, do you actually know what type of content brings the best performance and highest advantages in your emails?
Some awesome things you can try in your content include:
- Length– Length really plays a vital role, and it doesn’t matter what you like, Short or long content. It depends upon what does your audience like. Does your audience love short, attractive snippets comprising a link to read more and redirecting on your site, or they prefer to delve deep into a lengthy copy?
- Specific or Generic – It depends on your niche, whether Specific or Generic content would work out for you. It’s true that you should display different content for a different audience, on the basis of what you know about them. Testing out dynamic content vs. generic content and analyzing whether you get a hike in click-throughs is a cool idea.
- Positive or Negative language – You might find yourself scratching your head after reading this one. However, positivity vs. negativity is also a thing to test in your email’s language. When you introduce positivity into your email copy, you’re actually engaging your reader’s brain in a much dominating and powerful way, letting them easily absorb your key messages, and that’s how you increase their motivation toward click-through and also buy your product. Several tests have been conducted on using positive language, and most of the time, they’ve increased the email conversion rate by great margins, stating that using positive language is undoubtedly worth a test.
6.) Email Header Testing
The ideal practice is to keep your image height no over than 350px. This way, you can build an effective email header by following 3 major elements mentioned below:
- The company, brand, or person’s name responsible for forwarding the offer. The logo must be added in this section to enhance trust and the probability of getting recognized by your subscribers.
- Offer information in your email header as to the intent of your email (no matter it’s transactional, product campaign, or event-related ). It’s useful at this stage to re-evaluate your email’s relevance to ensure what your subscribers expect.
- A bigger, clearer, and enticing call-to-action must be incorporated. The CTA in this place is your chance to build subscriber interest, try encouraging them to read the entire message, and, eventually, try converting them into paying customers.
4 tips to conduct successful email A/B tests
Before jumping into the testing pool, firstly, you must follow these four tips to set your test perfectly to gain success:
1.) You must know about your testings: Email Testing Tip #1
This is basically a common sense tip. Marketers mostly tend to get excited by something that is shiny and goes running off in that direction instead of thinking things through. In this testing case, ensure that you slow down & figure outrightly about what you’re going to test and what you hope to earn or learn by testing it and what’s the process to measure it.
Take the email subject line you have. For example—you might want to test both the subject as well as the length of it. Take it as one piece of info at a time. In case you want to test your subject line’s length, then concentration is crucial before knowing what info you want to incorporate in the actual subject material.
What is the ideal length for the email subject line you have? This comes down on which devices are getting into usage by your subscribers to open your emails. Although thousands of email subscribers are just using desktop computers, still, email opens on mobile devices is getting drastically increased.
2.) Mostly, emails are opened in mobile devices: Email Testing Tip #2
With this fact in mind, there’s no approach to indicate which devices your subscribers are utilizing, so a good subject line character count must fall between 25-70 characters.
3.) The rule of two: Email Testing Tip #3
Now that you already know what’s there to test and why you must stay focused. The thumb rule of testing is just to test two variants at one time. For example, test 2 subject lines against each other at one time to see which one performs well by measuring the open rate. After that, you can use the top performer to froward out a campaign to your list.
You can also test about which call to action your readers prefer the most between a link & a button.
While a few brands select using a link for their CTAs, whereas the research shows that using buttons for the call to action is actually highly beneficial for your click-through rates. You can test these two variations in your email, one with a link CTA whereas the other one with a button, the results will be astounding.
Once you add a green button CTA, you’ll see a great increase in click-throughs on your emails.
4.) Take action on your results: Email Testing Tip #4
Have you ever run a test of email marketing? If yes, then how many times? Just waiting for the results can’t be enough! You must have an action plan in your email campaigns when you try testing something new.
For example, the subject line test that we described earlier, you would test two variations in A & B of the selected subject line (length & subject) by selecting a small sample of the subscribers you have and forwarding half of that sample email to A and half sample of the email to B. After getting the results of the sample emails, you can determine the best subject line and use it later on for the campaign that you forward to the rest of your subscribers.
Mostly, marketers have a one-and-done type of mentality. When we talk about testing emails, you must have a test-and-test-again way of mind because numerous factors can influence your results, from the time of sending to the design and links of your email list.
Troubleshooting specifics
- Is every single image in your email working?
- When using email templates, ensure the image has uploaded properly. In case you provided your own link in the image, ensure that you’re using absolute paths for images. That means you need your whole image URL, not only the file location on the server you have. Also, double-check to ensure that all of your images are perfectly hosted on your public web server or not, and aren’t present on a password-protected site.
- Are all of your links working perfectly?
- Tap on all your links and indicate whether they are working perfectly. Remember to change the broken link! So, a link in your test email will not redirect via and show an awful 404 not found page.
- Will I get blocked by spam filters?
- Keep the spam filters and traps in mind as you build your campaigns to ensure they won’t get stuck in your subscribers’ spam filters.
Testing merge tags
Merge tags snatch field data from your audience for generating personalized content, so they need to be associated with a live audience to show correctly. For example, while forwarding a test email from a campaign builder, you can’t replace the tags by having any data because you’ll just have your given email address.
6 Amazing Email Testing Tricks: The Conclusion
Talking about email marketing optimization, one of the absolute ideal ways to see what’s suitable or not is via A/B testing. Testing an email against another is the single way of knowing what sits well when your audience reads your emails, so after getting the best testing ideas from this guide, let’s talk about the email marketing’s most important step, which is actually the success key.
Undoubtedly, it’s verifying your email list! By that, you can maintain a good sender score and saving your emails from ending up in your subscribers’ spam folders. In true words, Email marketing can’t be done without proper Email verification, and that’s why we recommend you to explore Myemailverifier.com.