Five Best Practices to Test Your Marketing Emails

So you think you have the best email template and are ready to kick off your email campaigns? Probably you should wait a little more. It’s not what you feel about your email message. It’s about how your prospects feel when they receive your email and how do they respond to the same.

Testing few different email templates to figure out what works best for your campaign is one of the best strategies to run your email campaign successfully with the minimum risk of failure. You can send few different email templates to different small groups and see which email template brings you the maximum open rate, click through rate, and generate customer interest. Listed down are few tips to test your emails before you start-off your email campaign.

Choose Your Sample Size Wisely: If there is only one athlete running in a race, he will always be the winner. That is what happens when your sample size is too small. Similarly, you can’t test a bad template on a large group as it will lead to a huge opportunity loss. You should choose a sample size which may help you see a substantial number of observations to make any judgment.

Start Testing the Basics: Start with testing the basic email elements such as the subject line, name and other attributes. Your design team may easily come up with few different styles that you can test on few test groups and then select the best.

Timing Is Everything: Marketers should standardize the time at which the emails are to be sent. While running A/B tests, ensure that you normalize your times because a difference of even 30 minutes may create a huge difference. Based on your target geography and prospects, figure out the best time to send your emails and gain maximum open rate.

Test One Element at a Time: You may want to hurry and test several elements in your email to know faster results. However, the best strategy would be to test one element at a time to obtain clear, unambiguous test results.

Don’t Ignore Test Results: You may want to believe in your own instincts. But you should not ignore the results obtained by testing your emails. Even if your most favorite template fails to score well, you must give due importance to the test results and decide a more viable template as per the results obtained.

Email testing helps marketers determine what works best with their prospects. What they personally like may be completely opposite to what actually works. Knowing that difference of perception between a marketer and a prospect is highly pertinent.