Email marketing is one of the fastest-growing segments of Internet Marketing today. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of entrepreneurs starting email marketing businesses every day.
One of the primary reasons cost-effective start-up as compared to comparable brick and mortar businesses. Another reason is that there are so many tools available to be used to enhance your business potential.
The top email marketing providers include these tools, and they are at the heart of all Email Marketing businesses.
Most top Email Service Providers provide more useful tools for reports and analytics. These tools are available at the dashboard to help you run comparison tests on your email campaigns. The most popular of these testing systems are known as A/B Testing.
What is A/B Testing?
A/B Testing is a process that is built into many of the most popular ESP (Email Service provider) mailing systems. The tool is part of the dashboard that all paid members have access to when they sign up.
The tool allows the user to run simultaneous campaigns with different variations of email content. The process has you choose a small segment of your email list to send one variation and at the same time send another variation to another small of subscribers on your list.
After running each test campaign, check out the reports and compare the email open rates. Using this method, you can test several email subject lines and email content.
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How to best use A/B Testing in your Email Marketing Business
Top 7 things in your email campaign to use A/B Testing
- Your email subject lines
It’s crucial to know how to create engaging email subject lines that encourage your subscribers to open the email and take action. It’s the first thing your subscribers will see, so it should be super engaging.
By evaluating the A/B Testing results, you can see from the small sampling what kinds of words, subjects, and even formatting influenced your subscribers to even open the mail.
- Email message content
To have a very successful email marketing business, you have to have the messaging in the emails you are sending out. Therefore, you need to always fine-tune the content to ensure that you are delivering the best possible emails.
So, to achieve that, you need to take advantage of the A/B Testing tool that comes as a part of your dashboard that you get as a member of your ESP (Email Service Provider). This email testing tool allows you to tweak your message as the direct result of your previous email campaigns.
» MORE: How to Get Email Addresses for Email Marketing
- Use of personalization
In writing a winning email messaging, personalization is an effective method of getting your subscriber to click. This could apply to either the subject line or the content.
According to studies, people respond to seeing their name in the subject of an email sitting in the inbox of their email account. You can also determine if there is an amount of personalization that can go into the copy of your email body.
- Types of visual objects you place in your email
Visual effects often influence many people. So, you can employ some bright or flashy colors or representative images.
By running simultaneous testing campaigns, you can determine the sections that work best for your subscribers. For example, it may be the number of images or specific types of objects.
- The email copy you select
Being able to test different elements of the copy you use in your email messages is really helpful.
Several aspects of your copy can influence your subscribers to act, according to studies. Using the A/B Testing method, you can determine the best length for your copy and what kind of personalization works best.
- The tone of the email copy
According to several studies, the tone you use in creating your email copy has a big impact on your conversion rate.
The more positivity you interject into your wording, the more likely your subscribers will click on your Call To Action.
You can use A/B Testing to see if this works for your subscribers, and you see to what degree that it does help encourage them to click on your link in the email.
- Calls to action
The emails you send out as part of your marketing campaigns are made up of several different parts. Each of the parts is important to the success of your business.
The Call to Action is very important to the conversion rate of your email campaigns. So, A/B Testing allows you to determine which of your specific call CTA convinces the most people to click on your sales link in your email. Knowing what influences the most people to click should help you improve your conversion rates in your future email campaigns.
» MORE: How Much Does an Email Marketing Campaign Cost?
- Button or hyperlink text
Encouraging your subscribers to click on the link inside your email is the ultimate goal of any email campaign. These links can either be a visual aid like a symbolic button or a text-type hyperlink.
The A/B Testing tool allows you to determine whether your subscribers prefer a text link or a graphical button for your Call to Action. You may also want to run tests on which types of buttons work more effectively when it comes to being clicked.
The Bottom Line
In the end, the key to a successful email marketing business is to engage and motivate your subscriber list to become active buyers.
To ensure that happens, you need to send out the best possible email campaigns. There is no better way to know that in advance than running tests to see if your subscribers will open and click on your sales links in your emails. The best way to do that is to take advantage of a tool like the A/B Testing, and that will tell you more about what your subscribers are looking for.