Why A/B Testing of Email Subject Line Is Important?
Email marketing is one of effective marketing strategy used by many organizations.. Due to an information age ,flood gates of information are opened to people. They receive lot of marketing emails everyday. If you want to stand out in the crowd and want to improve your email open rates then your marketing email design has to be innovative and creative. Email subject line is one of the important element of marketing email. Your email subject line often determines whether an email is opened and how the recipient responds. There are many tips and rules about how to write effective subject lines, but its not about what you say, its about how you say. You need to figure out “what you are saying “is working out. You need to experiment what types of subject lines yield the best results for your diverse email list.
Introduce split testing or A/B testing
Split testing or A/B testing is one of the way through which you can experiment your email subject lines. A/B testing helps you to understand how to appeal to your audience. It provides you insight into how recipients respond to your subject lines'length,keywords used,style used etc. A/B testing helps you to be innovative and creative with your subject lines. You can see how your target audience is responding to your creativity.
How A/B testing of email subject line works
For A/B testing of your email subject line, you set up two variations of email subject lines and send them to a small percentage of your total recipients. Half of the test group is sent Version A and the other half gets Version B. The result is measured by the most opens or clicks, determines the winning email subject line and that version is sent to the remaining subscribers.
You could test personalization of your email subject lines. You can personalize your subject lines with company name, or recipients name and see how your audience responds. Some people may appreciate it or some people may feel creeped out. There are number of other variables that you can experiment and explore for example you can check how your recipients respond to ALL CAPS, active verbs etc. A/B testing provides you an opportunity to take risk and experiment because in A/B testing you send marketing email to only small segment of your list.
While A/B testing your email subject lines , don't test too many variables at one time , this might lead to confusion. Be concise and precise.
