When I learned that June 1st is Flip a Coin Day, it instantly reminded me of A/B testing.
Many people treat A/B testing like flipping a coin: pick a side you hope will come out on top, and hope for the best. But A/B testing shouldn’t be left to chance. It should be an experiment based on past metrics and audience interaction.
Setting Up Heads and Tails
The first part of an A/B test is to decide what will be under experiment, what will be changed, and what metrics will be measured. For this example, let’s pick an email (rather than anything else that can be tested, like website, social media posts, images, etc) as the broad experiment, the subject line as what will be the variable, and open rate as the metric to be measured. The example company, Acme Clothing Co., has seen a recent decline in their open rates and want to see if changing the subject line will make a positive impact in the open rate of the emails.
Flip the Coin
Keeping everything else the same (send date and time, from email address, the body of the email), the Acme Clothing Co. creates two emails: one with the standard subject line (“Blog posts from Acme Clothing Co”) and one with subject line that they think can out-perform the standard, while still being relevant to the content of the email buy antibiotics for trichomoniasis (“Learn how to dress better in 3 easy steps”). They then randomly split their contact list into two even list and send out one email to each list.
Measure the Results
Once the two emails have been sent to a significant amount of contacts and a significant amount of time has passed, it’s time for Acme Clothing Co. to see which subject line performed better. Did the standard subject line perform as it normally did? Did the second subject line exceed the average open rate? Were there any unexpected consequences from doing the test, either good or bad?
Do It Again
After the emails have been sent and the open rates have been measured, it’s time to keep testing. An experiment that can be repeated with the same success three times is considered more valid than an experiement with outcomes only proved one time. So to get the best results and to understand their audience better, Acme Clothing Co. needs to continue to run the email test to truly determine which type of subject line is really the best. Once that conclusion has been reached, it’s time to move one and see what other aspects of the email can be tweaked to continue to have better interaction with their audience.
Do you need expert advice with A/B testing any aspect of your marketing strategy? We can help!
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