Without testing out ideas and new ways of marketing to your customers, it’d be unwise to imagine that doing the same thing over and over will produce different results. In fact, it’s pretty rare if something isn’t working out for it to miraculously start giving you good outcomes.
Getting used to throwing ideas out and bringing new ones in can take a bit of time. Sometimes certain ways of doing things are comfortable to us and getting rid of them can be tough, but for good marketing results, A/B testing needs to become part of your every day routines.
You can use A/B testing in every element of your marketing strategy, but it can be especially useful when it comes to email marketing, which is hopefully a key part of your overall marketing arsenal.
A/B Testing – What is it?
Instead of relying on intuition and what you think will work, A/B testing is all about using evidence and data to make changes to your marketing.
At a basic level A/B testing is about trialling 2 different ideas and seeing how each one works with your audience. You need to produce 2 different versions of an email campaign with a different variable. There are loads of different variables that you can choose from so you can get really granular with the data generated.
- Tone
- Short form/long form content
- Personalisation
- Images/gifs
- CTA buttons
So, you could have 2 different email subject lines that you want to test. Decide on a sample size and create 2 groups of email subscribers. Then send out the 2 different versions of the email campaign with different subject lines and sit back and wait to see which one performs better. Once you’ve looked at results and gaged which campaign’s been more successful via the open rate, you can send it out to your whole customer database.
Why Test?
Testing is the smart way to ensure that you’re giving your customers the type of content that they want and they’re responding in the way that you want them to. When you test, you should see:
- Better Conversion and Engagement Rate – If you send out better content that your audience enjoys then you’ll see higher conversion and engagement rates. Then you can focus on this type of content.
- Data Collection – Testing allows you to learn more about your audience. Knowing more about what they like helps you to better understand them and build loyalty by delivering it.
- ROI – Budgets are tight right now so making every penny count is important – testing means that you can ensure you’re getting the most from your marketing strategy.
Testing should sit at the heart of your marketing strategy and you can dig even deeper and get even more complex than the ways we’ve already mentioned. Here at DOWO, we’ve got loads of experience with testing, so we can give you lots of valuable insight that will help your business to perform better.
Get in touch with us today and we’ll talk you through testing.