How A/B Split Testing Works

What's the best day to send your email marketing campaign? Weekdays? Weekends? What time? Early morning, or late afternoon? What kind of subject line works best? Something with a hard sell? Or something more subtle and informative? Will people open your email if you include "FREE" in the subject line?

It all depends. And the only way to know for sure is to experiment with your campaigns. The most common way to experiment is to run an A/B split test.

A/B Split Test Ideas

Here are some quick ideas for experiments you can run on your email campaigns:

• What day of the week gets you better open rates?
• What time of day works best for your promotional (e-coupons, special sales, "act now!" etc) campaigns?
• What day/time works best for your informative "newsletter" campaigns?
• What subject line style works best? Hard sell? Soft sell?
• Should your subject line always include your company name? Or should it be a long, descriptive subject line detailing what's inside the message?
• Is it better to use your company's name in the "From" line, or a human's name?
• Does time of day affect overall click rate?

Running A/B split tests on your email marketing campaigns used to be pretty complicated. You had to setup "random slice" segments, create two campaigns, check stats, then send a final campaign. Most people barely have enough time to send one campaign, let alone two additional tests. Well, we just made A/B testing your email campaigns easy and automatic.

A/B Testing With MailChimp's Email Optimizer

With the patent-pending MailChimp Email Optimizer, you simply select the type of test you want to run, and the size of your sample groups. We take care of the rest, automatically. Learn how to use A/B testing with the MailChimp Email Optimizer...

Other A/B Split Resources:

• How to use A/B Split Testing to Increase Conversion Rates MarketingExperiments.com
• With A/B Testing, You don't think-you know - Jeff Campbell, Resolution Media
• How to Improve A/B Testing - Bryan Eisenberg
• Subject Line Testing Scenarios - A handful of very quick, easy subject line a/b tests you can run right now.
• Email Marketing Needs A/B Testing: A fan of ConstantContact.com discusses the need for A/B testing
• The Most Important E-Mail Marketing Tactic of All: Bill Nussey of Silverpop discusses why A/B testing your email marketing is so important, and gives some suggestions on what to test.
• Testing and Email Marketing: A list of resources about testing your email marketing campaigns
• 10 Quick Wins for Email Marketing: #7 - Testing (tips from iMedia Connection)
• Incorporate Testing Into Your Game Plan: Blog post from David Baker at MediaPost
• 1/3 Opens Occur in First Hour: When you send an A/B test, how long should you wait to check stats?

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