How Email A/B Testing Maximizes Your Conversions

Phonexa

11 minute read

In a crowded inbox, the smallest changes in your emails can make the biggest difference. Carefully crafted emails capture attention, nurture, build trust, and drive conversions – all by leveraging deep personalization that makes every message hard to ignore.

But there’s a condition: your emails must be carefully refined to reap those benefits, and there’s no better way to achieve that than email A/B testing, a data-driven optimization approach that can boost your email ROI up to 3,600%.

Keep reading to explore what email A/B testing entails, the business value it delivers, and how to time your A/B tests effectively.

Book a free demo to learn how Phonexa’s marketing software suite can help you drive business growth. 

What Is Email A/B Testing?

Email A/B testing is the process of assessing two versions of an email component, such as the subject line or CTA, to determine which version drives higher open, click-through, or conversion rates.

To achieve fair results, marketers should test these variables on the same audience and, ideally, at the same time. 

For reliable insights, test only one variable at a time. Otherwise, you won’t be able to identify what change brought results, and you risk losing valuable insights for future campaigns.

Which Variables Should You Test

Subject Lines 

Users are flooded with promotions every day, making attention the biggest marketing hurdle, and subject lines help you overcome it. 

To ensure that your subject line achieves maximum open rate, you must use email A/B testing to find the perfect balance of these parameters:

• Length: Convey the gist of your email and hook the reader without fluff and crossing the 60-character limit
• Personalization: Address the pains and desires of your audience to establish emotional resonance from the very beginning of your letter
• Urgency: Make recipients feel that they should interact with your email right now to get the ultimate value
• Benefits: Highlight features and benefits that are the primary driving factors for your audience
• Tone of voice: Tailor your subject line to the tone of voice that’s both relevant to your audience and brand

Graphics

Gone are the days when emails were just plain text. Now, you can include banners, product images, infographics, and other visual elements that engage readers in different ways. Experiment with mixing informative, fun, and visually satisfying graphics to see what resonates with your audience.

Email Copy 

Your email copy is divided into several elements – lead paragraph, body, and CTA – each has a different purpose.

Important tip: Remember that all three components work in sync, which is why it’s essential to maintain a consistent tone of voice, benefits, and personalization.

Time & Frequency of Delivery

The time and day you send your emails are crucial to their effectiveness. Thursday proves to be the most effective, scoring a 6.87% reply rate, while Monday, Friday, and weekends are the opposite, with just 5.4%.

As for the hours, distribute your emails strictly between 9 am and 12 pm – hesitation decays your clicks. 

The frequency of your emails should be around 1 to 3 emails per week. It helps you stay in the user’s view without being obtrusive, which is a perfect balance to keep users primed up for an action.

Benefits of Email A/B Testing

Safely Test New Ideas

Marketers know that few endeavors bring expected results out of the box. In fact, altering your tone of voice or the benefits you highlight in your copy may have unintended negative effects and deter a percentage of your audience.

Email A/B testing helps you avoid such consequences by measuring the effect of your new ideas on a small group before a full-scale launch. 

Conversion Rate Optimization

Although emails are essential for generating, nurturing, and retaining customers, their primary purpose is to convert leads. Email A/B testing helps you streamline your conversion pipeline by not only outlining the most effective CTAs but also optimizing your subject lines and email copy – areas where users may drop off in the customer journey.

Deeper Audience Understanding

Email A/B testing enables you to tap into what drives your audience and use these triggers to enhance your communication across your website, social media, and other marketing touchpoints.

For example, through A/B email marketing tests, HVAC providers can discover that their audience seeks urgent solutions due to changes in the weather. This insight helps businesses ramp up marketing during winter or summer and emphasize the promptness of their HVAC services across all channels.

Long-Term ROI Growth

By testing different email components and studying how they synergize, you discover their most ROI-effective combinations. They help you maximize revenue from email campaigns and scale.

Continuous Improvement

Users’ preferences change constantly; what persuaded customers yesterday may no longer grab their attention today, forcing businesses to adapt. A/B tests help you keep up with your audience’s preferences by keeping your finger on the pulse.

Improved User Experience

UX is all about establishing relevant and consistent communication with your audience. By measuring how your recipients react to different visuals, tone of voice, CTAs, etc., you understand how to build relationships with users across all touchpoints. 

Beyond that, email A/B testing reports the most effective banners and forms in your arsenal. This data helps you organize your promotional assets in order of importance, so that users are more likely to engage with content that drives action.

Target Generation Z

Email and its optimization should be your top priority if your target audience consists of individuals born between 1997 and 2012, commonly referred to as Generation Z.

Source: Campaign Monitor 

Email A/B testing optimizes a touchpoint with a high concentration of Gen Z users, making sure that your message reaches as many users from the corresponding age group as possible. 

How To Perform Email A/B Testing

1. Define Goals

First and foremost, review your current email marketing KPIs and identify which areas need improvement:

Now, you should formulate a hypothesis. Here’s an example: If we present more relevant benefits in our subject line, our open rates may increase, which, in turn, can improve click-through and conversion rates.

2. Create Variables

This step of the process differs based on the variables you create. To build on the example with a subject line improvement, you should return to your ideal customer profile (ICP) and think of what benefits users are willing to pay for. 

Are you providing financial assistance? You should definitely indicate the services you offer and, likely, the timeframe for their delivery.

To eliminate guesswork from the process, it is essential to rely on real data. You can dig it with Phonexa’s HitMetrix, a user behavior recording and analytics solution that helps you understand your audience by tracking and documenting their behavior during website sessions. It reveals their genuine interests, which you can use as pivot points in your subject lines, CTAs, or banners.

You can learn more about HitMetrix here:

3. Run Tests

Although marketers typically allocate between 10% and 20% of the email list for A/B testing, feel free to cross those borders. For instance, if your list has over 20,000 recipients, even a 10% rate is excessive, and you may want to consider a rate as low as 5%.

Among multiple ways to split your emails, a manual one is at the worst end. It requires you to handpick recipients and manually transfer their contacts into your message and sheets/documents, a lingering and painstaking process. 

A more convenient and faster way to prepare your email list for A/B testing is through E-Delivery. It’s a Phonexa email marketing solution that enables splitting your audience into multiple delivery channels, exactly what you need for A/B testing. 

Here’s how you can configure each delivery channel: 

• Integration: Quickly switch between multiple email service providers (ESPs), including PostMark, MailGun, and MailJet.
• Fallover information: Add backup ESPs that intercept your channels when a percentage of their messages fail to arrive.
• Sender ID: Switch IDs to segment your message types and preserve your IP reputation when testing new approaches.

Book a demo to learn how Phonexa’s marketing software suite can help you drive business growth.

An important note: If you want to test more than two variations of your emails, a process known as A/B/C testing, create extra channels of delivery and allocate more recipients. 

4. Determine a Top Performer

Have 24 – 48 hours passed since your test email distribution? Hit your analytics panel and measure the results – the variable whose KPIs are the closest to your hypothesis should be distributed across your remaining audience.

Remember to store and analyze data obtained during A/B testing. Understanding why altered email components trigger specific reactions enables you to refine your promotional assets and marketing strategies.

When Should You Perform Email A/B Testing

Inform Your Email Strategies 

As a business person, you don’t want to act when the shoe drops – you want to forecast when and how it can happen and take action to prevent it.

That’s exactly what a data-driven approach powered by email A/B testing is about. It reveals the impact of your marketing decisions, guiding your strategies in the right direction.

Conducting day-to-day email A/B testing pushes the boundaries of your business, putting new areas for improvement on the map. These can be combinations of benefits or emotional triggers you haven’t considered yet.

Cover a Large Audience

The larger your email list, the greater your responsibility. Relying on intuition when reaching over 10,000 users may undermine your effort, and in the worst-case scenario, cause users to unsubscribe. 

With email A/B testing, you compose your messages out of metric-informed elements, knowing the exact effect they will have on your recipients. 

Fix Underperforming Emails

No marketing campaign provides the expected results right away, right? Whether you aim for more conversions, app installs, or other objectives, email marketing A/B testing becomes your lifesaver, leveraging actionable insights to help you reach your goals.

If you find those goals unclear due to not knowing the potential of your email marketing, follow the industry average metrics. You can find them in benchmark reports from ESPs, like Mailchimp or GetResponse.

Boost Sales With Email Outreach

One of the clearest examples of that is when you launch a new product or service that might interest your loyal customers. As they probably don’t check your website catalogue consistently, you want to inform them about new arrivals, ensuring that your message is heard through email A/B testing. 

Discounted offers require similar treatment. Whether there’s a sale on your website or you offer unique discounts for users at the bottom of your funnel, you want to split-test your messages to make them as relevant as possible.

Elevate Your Performance Marketing With Phonexa

Simple at its core, Phonexa’s E-Delivery is more than just A/B testing software. Combine its automated email distribution with LMS Sync or Call Logic, and you gain the ability to generate, nurture, and remarket your leads and calls to capitalize on every earning opportunity.

Explore Phonexa’s software in detail in this short video:

Get Phonexa’s all-in-one performance marketing software suite at a single price:

Book a free demo to learn more about Phonexa’s marketing software suite.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is A/B testing in email marketing?

Email A/B testing is the process of testing two variations of an email variable, such as the subject line or CTA, on a small segment of your audience to determine the best performer. It leaves you with a better email and actionable insights that will enhance your marketing across the board.

What are email testing best practices?

Whenever you split-test, begin by formulating a hypothesis and then proceed to develop variations of the variable. As you do, strive to draw on real data whenever possible. Wait up to 48 hours after distributing your testing emails, and adopt a variable that’s the closest to the hypothesis.

Can I change multiple variables within a single email split testing?

No, you can’t. Though it may seem rational at first – after all, you discover which email is more effective – you can’t identify a change that led to it, which means that you got no actionable data.