E-mail marketing - 3 min. read

Improve your B2B campaigns by A/B testing your email subject lines

Nearly half – 47% – of recipients decide whether to open or discard based exclusively on the subject line, and 69% report an email as spam. With that in mind, your subject line is your digital calling card, and it needs to get that door opened.

Are you A/B testing your email subject lines?

If you want to improve your open rate you need to take a step in the right direction towards better results from your email campaigns. In this article, we outline the process of testing subject lines that will improve your email marketing results.

A step by step process for testing subject lines.

Decide what you want to learn. The best thing to do in order to know more about your audience is to test the subject lines. To do this, try to think of all the questions or uncertainties you’ve ever had when writing subject lines for email campaigns:
• What type of subject work best for my audience?
• If I put a number on the subject line will increase the open rate?
• Should I use subject line personalization?
• Use a question in the subject line?

If you want to find out the answer of all those questions you need to start A/B testing your subject line. After that, you collect the results and then measure them. Conducting a single A/B test on two subject lines is easy, both tests go out at the same time, to the same amount of people and the winner is automatically selected for you. However, when you start trying to compare multiple A/B subject line tests against each other, you start to introduce a lot of variables that can affect your results. Things like the number of recipients, length of test, day sent and time sent can all impact the results of a specific test and therefore give you misleading information if you are trying to compare two different tests together to get some insight. For a clear insight into your results, make sure you use the right tools that offer you information that you need in order to improve your e-mail campaigns. Read more about Bisens Toolkit here.

Analyze the results

Once you’ve run your email campaign with the two different email versions, it’s time to take a look at the results. There are a few different categories of results you’ll want to look at:
• The open rate
• The click-through rate
• The conversion rate once they’re on your website

Personalization

The great thing about email is its ability to reach your audience on a one-to-one level. With personalization, you can nurture that connection and incite action from your readers. Try adding personalization to your subject line in an A/B test to see if it improves open rates. After that, measure the results to see what subject line perform better.

Conclusion

A/B testing is a great way to make sure you’re communicating with your audience in the most effective way. Some would argue that there are limitations, such as focusing too much on the majority despite a potentially large group of people still favoring the “losing” option. However, most marketers would agree that it is important to test, ask questions and optimize wherever possible and A/B testing is a great way to introduce this way of thinking into your marketing practice. Marketing is a science, and with the best tools you can have a right image about your performance, that can help you on the future to make better campaigns.

Establishing your email marketing goals will dictate the type of campaigns you send, who you target, the content you include, and how you measure success. The final goal is to constantly fill-up your sales pipe with quality leads.