22 Sep 08 A/B Testing Email Campaigns
Inspiration Point: Split-testing email campaigns
A/B testing in terms of web development is traditionally thought of as a function of a landing pages. This is largly because campaigns can run for weeks, months or even years (time is on your side) and most landing pages should have straight forward, measurable call-to-actions.
On the flip side, email campaigns are very rarely thought of as A/B testing material. Most often you blast out an email campaign to a list one time. You can’t refine your email and resend it to the same list to see if it will be more effective…it just doesn’t work that way. If you have a large list and your running a campaign that isn’t time sensitive you can run a proper A/B test by sending your emails in a series rather than all at once but this seems to be a rarity.
Kristina Knight from Biz Report suggests that when you launch an email campaign you should use A/B testing as a means to progressively learn how to write effective ad copy. For example, you might find a term or phrase to be marginally more effective than a synonym. I generally agree with this approach. It’s great to learn as much as you can from your past work in order to enhance your future work. Still, I think it is best to run email marketing A/B tests in a series in order to get some short and long term value from your testing efforts.
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