Email Marketing Split Testing

If you have read very many good email marketing articles, you probably have read countless times to continue to analyze the performance of your emails that you are sending out. There are so many variations when it comes to what works and what is not working. At the same time, any email marketer with their salt will tell you never to spam your list. The problem now is, if you are sending out only a limited number of emails each year then how are you really supposed to analyze the performance?

This is where split testing comes into play. Split testing is the process in which you test two or more things in the emails you send to your opted in list. So for example, you want to test the format of your newsletter. You might gather three different formats of the same newsletter. Send the first format to the first 1/3rd of your list. The second, to the second 1/3rd. Of course, the third formatted newsletter would go to the last 1/3rd of your list. The benefit here is that you will be able to see which newsletter performed the best.

Not only could you test format, but you could also test out subject lines. You could see which subject line had the best response. So the idea in mind here is be able to determine which subject would work the best so that you can use that format and subject line in the future as well. Maximizing the profit and return of investment of time spent on each email sent.

This may sound difficult and time consuming, and it is. I am not going to tell you that making three different copies of a newsletter or email is easy. It is not. The thing is though is that you can either spend a year just testing what works, or maybe speed up the process by testing out multiple things in a single month. Hopefully it will quickly get you to the place you want to be. Within a few months, you should have maximized the profits you would generate from your email marketing campaign.

A quick tip as well is to split who you are testing randomly by who has been on the list the longest. Naturally, most people who are on your list recently are frequently more interested in what you have to say. It is not that those older opted in people are not interested, it is just they may be used to receiving emails from you. When this is the case, they will be more inclined to delete them unless they are regular readers. This may be something else you need to individually test out, but this has just been my experience. Therefore, when split testing, I would encourage you to take a sample and not just send one format to the emails on your list the longest and then another to the newest ones. Spread it around and if your email marketing software has it available, you could just do it randomly.

Also, never hesitate to continue to test things out. For example, if you have split tested a subject, you found that one subject worked over another. Try to analyze why that one was the most popular. Perhaps you had your product as the first word on the subject line, what about putting a discount like “50% off” in the subject line with it? Would that help, or does it hurt you? Do not just settle on a subject line after you have split tested it one time. You can continuously be improving on it each month, making much more progress on improving your email marketing campaigns.

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