Smart Choice: A/B Test Email Subject Lines

Burgers or pizza? Beach or pool? Cat or dog? Life is full of choices.

Every moment of every day we are deluged with information, which we must process, sort through and act upon. Fighting an overwhelming tide of incoming emails, most of us pick and choose a small percentage of emails to open and read (or more likely, scan). The others are banished to the trash bin with a simple click and hardly a millisecond of thought.

So how to get your email to bubble up in those overflowing in-boxes to gain the attention of customers, partners and prospects? Ironically, it’s with a choice of your own.

A/B testing – a quick primer

A/B testing is used routinely in both online and offline marketing to compare alternatives and identify which one performs best with the targeted audience. From website landing page layouts to print advertisements, call-to-action button colors to design of billboards, it is a proven strategy for testing different marketing executions.

A/B testing is a perfect vehicle to optimize your email subject lines, helping you find the best one to capture a reader’s attention in an overflowing in-box.

Email subject lines: First things first (the 4 “R’s”)

• Refine: While A/B testing will help you find the better performing alternative between two subject line options, start with some prep work beforehand. Take time to hone your phrasing, pare back superfluous words and utilize best practices for creating powerful subject lines.

• Request: Who doesn’t feel irked when deluged with marketing emails after purchasing from an online eCommerce site? While the fine print typically includes language about implied consent, unrestrained emailing without express “opt-in” permission is a quick way to sour a customer.

• Respect your audience by offering the ability to choose the topics they’re interested in and the cadence of your emails. This user preference functionality is embedded in most email marketing programs and is rewarded with positive subscriber actions (Wordstream cites increased open rates +14% and click-throughs +101%).

• Respond: Rather than adding a new subscriber to all of your email lists, consider using click segmentation, which automatically adds subscribers to a specific list only after they demonstrate interest by clicking on content related to that topic.

A/B testing step-by-step

Subject line testing within email marketing platforms is a blissfully simple process. You create the email content and two alternative subject lines. As usual, you select the day and time for mailing and specify the lists to receive the email. When A/B testing, you also designate the percentage of the list to act as your test audience for the two subject lines and the interval of time between the test and the subsequent mailing.

Based on your selections, the marketing platform portions your list, mailing each subject line to half of the test audience. At the completion of the testing period, the software calculates open rates for each subject line and automatically sends the remaining emails with the better-performing subject line. How’s that for raising the effectiveness bar?

Once you’ve started using A/B testing for your email subject lines, you’ll start to notice trends about your audience — for example, subject lines that pose questions, humorous ones or those with numbers in them (like 8 ways to do something, or 5 tips) may perform better. Apply this marketing intelligence to your future work to start off with better subject line alternatives.

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