When you build an email marketing campaign, it’s imperative that you conduct some form of testing to ensure that your campaign works as well as possible. There are many different types of tests that you can conduct to help you improve your email marketing efforts.
Plain Text versus Visual Message
You have a lot of leeway today in your ability to send beautiful and artistic messages. But should you? In many cases, plain text messages outperform visual messages. It depends on your audience, but you should conduct a test to be sure. Divide your audience and send half of them the visual message and half the text version.
Different Layouts
How your email layout looks may make a big difference too. When testing layout, change only one small thing. And again, separate your audience into two, and then send the different versions to each audience. How do they perform?
Call to Action Placement
Where you place your CTA can make a big difference too. When you test your CTA placement, you only want to test that one thing. That’s the only way to ensure that you’re testing for the CTA placement.
Time of Day
Another test that you should do is test the time of day that you send your messages to find out what time of day gets more response. You may find several times of day and days of the week that get more traction than others. This may require multiple tests to get right.
Types of Content
You can send a lot of different types of content via email today. You can send video, links to full articles, links to sales pages, and put contextual information inside. It’s up to you. But what does your audience prefer? The best way to test this is to break it up. Try to focus on one type of content at a time in your testing.
Message Tone
Another thing you can test, which is a little riskier, is the tone of your message. For example, if you have unresponsive sign-ups, you might want to try a more aggressive approach to finding out if they’ll respond in some way – even by unsubscribing.
Subject Lines
Trying different subject lines is the best way to ensure that your message gets opened. The key with subject lines is to be direct, using keywords and without trying to trick your audience into the opening. It’s better that they open it with accurate thoughts as to what’s inside.
The truth is, testing is the key to email marketing success. It’s one of the ways that you have full control over the success you experience.