Emails are the gateway to any good business-to-customer relationship. Getting them right is hard, but rewarding. Getting them wrong? Simpler and much more damaging. With any channel you choose to interact with your customers, it needs to be well thought out, well managed and thoroughly tested.
Imagine, if you will, the relationship you currently have with your customers. Think about your current open, click through and even your bounce rates. Could they be better? Could they work harder? In truth, there’s nothing that can’t be improved or worked upon but getting these three basics right can hold you in good stead for creating long lasting and engaging relationships with your customer database.
What is A/B testing in email marketing?
A/B testing can be carried out on various channels and isn’t exclusive to email marketing. For example, you can perform A/B testing on website product pages to improve add-to-cart rates, or on landing pages to identify any roadblocks to conversion.
Email A/B testing is quite a simple concept – it’s the practice of testing two versions of an email to compare key metrics such as click through rates, open rates and conversions to see which one performs better. The findings can then be used to inform your email marketing strategy going forward to generate better results for your campaigns.
A/B testing to boost open rates
Subject lines
A great subject line can be the making of a great email campaign. You could spend hours crafting the content inside, curating the images and writing stellar copy but if no one opens it, no one reads it. No one sees it. No one clicks on it. No one bothers. All the while the time and effort you put into your campaign is void as it’s failed to attract the attention of your audience.
By simply testing your subject lines and adapting your tone of voice, you can begin to tailor to your audience’s preferences. Send the same email with different headers to your audience using a 50/50 split. When you find your winner, improve on it for next time. Does your audience respond well to emojis? You won’t know until you try it!
NOTE: write consciously, descriptively and talk about the highlights of the content inside.
Email cadence
There’s already been some fabulous research created by our friends at MailChimp to help businesses decide on the best cadence (ideal send time and frequency) for your emails. This is a great place to start when you want to begin testing but like every person, every business is different. Your audience might slightly differ from the norm, so testing your send days and times can have a huge impact on your business email KPIs.
We recently tested different send times for one of our sports ecommerce clients to determine the best time of day for engagement. Out of the six tests performed, we discovered that the emails sent later in the day (12pm – 5pm) resulted in more revenue.
NOTE: find your customer trends – they may not be the norm. Don’t get stuck in an email rut, test and find your email sweet spot.
A/B testing email content
Once you’ve got the attention of your customer with a killer subject line, it’s reached them on their optimum time and opening day, it’s time to close the deal with some killer content.
Whether you’re advertising a sale or your latest product launches, there’s no “correct” way of displaying the goods. Testing your content can be as substantial as complete image changes or as small as changing the colour of call-to-action buttons.
You may find, for example that shorter, more concise content produces better results for B2C clients, but may not be as useful for B2B clients, as information and content is key for messaging. Remember your audience. Analyse your results from most clicked links and decide whether it’s time to start testing. Getting this bit right will equate to the golden CTR you’re after, and to the revenue generation or sign-ups you were aiming for.
If you’re looking for ideas, or want to keep an eye on the competition you can check out databases like MailCharts to have a peek at recent emails from 2,500+ hand-picked brands without having to subscribe to them all yourself. Ecommerce brands can see where they stack up against others in their industry for key metrics like click rates, open rates and revenue with Klaviyo’s 2025 Benchmark Report.
NOTE: content is, and has always been, king. There’s no one way of showing how good you are and why someone should come to you, so don’t be afraid to experiment.
A/B testing email templates
Design is just as important as any other aspect of an email. Your email templates heavily influence user experience and reinforce your brand identity. When designing email templates, you should always consider the user journey and how you’ll guide subscribers to take the desired action. Layouts should be responsive, accessible and easy to scan.
When it comes to the finer details, however, different designs can work better for different audiences or purposes. For one of our clients in the beauty sector, we recently tested the efficiency of including a category header bar. We ran five A/B tests and found that the majority resulted in an even split in terms of clicks, but the versions with the header bar generally produced more revenue – up to 269% more in some cases.
NOTE: work with a designer to ensure all of your email templates are on-brand. It’s important to deliver a consistent brand identity across all platforms.
A/B testing by device
In this day and age, most people are opening their emails on mobile, and devices can play a role in how recipients interact with your content. We use click maps to see how behaviour differs between mobile and desktop users. For example, mobile users tend to click on category bars less frequently than those on desktop devices.
NOTE: make sure your email templates are fully responsive and optimised for all devices. A poor user experience will cost you conversions.
If you’d like to talk to the team about how we can help improve your email marketing strategy, get in touch and we’ll let you know exactly how we can help.
