Unlock the Power of Email Testing: Discover Why It’s Vital to Your Business’s Success!

Business owners still see email marketing as the most cost-effective and conversion-rich method for promoting their products and services and building relationships with potential customers. Why is it so powerful?

According to a recent study, email marketing ROI is 122 percent, which is the highest ROI of any digital marketing channel. The most effective way to increase your performance is to combine email marketing and social media or enable live chat, as this is the fastest way to reach customers. 

However, this article will focus on improving email marketing efforts through email testing. Putting together emails that align with your marketing goals and focus on your target audience takes a lot of research and strategizing.

All email marketers should do email testing, as it directly impacts message quality and deliverability and indirectly impacts subscribers’ retention. Here are the best practices you can follow for email testing.

Email testing: what is it?

The email testing process allows you to view your email before publishing it. Many email marketers offer a web app for previewing emails or an option to send yourself a test email.

By testing your emails, you will be able to fix broken email designs, track broken or untracked links, choose a subject line with a higher open rate, eliminate spelling and grammar errors, damage images or deleted alt text, and more. Let’s take a closer look at seven elements you should consider testing.

Testing Elements In Emails

To know what impacts your results, we recommend you don’t test more than one thing at a time. Focus on one and measure your results against it.

✅ The subject line

Your subject line is the first thing your recipients will see and decide whether or not to read your message. The subject line appears differently on most devices due to email clients, display sizes, font differences, etc.

It is important to use a catchy and interesting subject line. At the same time, it should not sound spammy, otherwise, it will end up in the spam or junk folder.

• An example of a bad offer: Here is a FREE newsletter with top articles! 
• An example of a good offer: John, here are my top reads for February

Subject line length

The average read rate is highest for subject lines between 61 and 70 characters. Tests are the only way to determine what the best length of your email subject line should be for your campaign.

During every campaign, you should run an A/B test to see what subject line length will give you the best results.

Personalization

The effectiveness of personalized emails is proven. When added to the subject line, the recipient’s name increases by over 18 percent, making it the most effective word you can use.

Next time you send an email campaign, consider A/B testing it. For instance:

A: Maria, you can save 50% with this code

B: Maria, how about a great discount?

You can improve your personalization efforts with micro-segmentation. Consider experimenting with a more diverse segmentation, delivering offers and content to focused groups of users.

Other options include referencing the recipient’s previous orders, their company name or state, or adding other types of personalization.

✅ The content

Content is important to email marketing, but do you truly understand the value of quality content?

If you figure out which content format works best for your newsletters and other email campaigns, you can easily select the resources in the future for similar recipients and use the most appropriate email template.

In your messages, you can link out to the following:

• Demo videos vs. case studies.
• Webinars vs. blog articles.
• PowerPoint presentations vs. PDFs.
• Whitepapers vs. reports.

✅ Elements of media

Include images, GIFs, videos, and other media elements that resonate with your recipients to improve your email performance.

Test your emails with similar alt and title text before sending. In cases where email clients do not load media files, the title and alt text can be important.

Don’t change the title or alt tags in your test and keep your data clear.

Alternatively, you can look at this. Start by testing placement or density and then move on to image type or color.

As an alternative to images and GIFs, you should consider incorporating video marketing into your email campaigns to increase brand awareness, improve sales, and improve customer engagement.

✅ Time and date

It is important to run your day and time tests more than once. You may have to deal with ISP slowdowns, holidays, or other unexpected events that can keep your recipients offline.

You should run your date and time test several times to ensure nothing impacts the data and your final answer.

As a result of the pandemic effect, user behavior has changed. Because of this, such unpopular days for sending marketing emails (Fridays and Saturdays) have become a good alternative to overused days (Tuesdays and Thursdays).

You should consider at least three day and time scenarios when sending a newsletter:

1. Deliveries are traditionally made on Tuesdays or Thursdays between 1-3 pm.
2. On Wednesdays, 11-12 AM is an experimental delivery time.
3. An extraordinary delivery time is Friday 9-11 AM or Saturday noon.

✅ Special Offers and Promotions

A new normal for generating customer interest is to offer massive promotions several times a year. More than ninety percent of consumers will do business with brands that offer personalized, relevant offers and recommendations.

While a popular promotion can end up costing you a lot of money, one that is well-received can bring you a lot of profit.

Don’t forget that certain segments of your list may respond better to one type of offer and promotion than to another. It is a good idea to run a test with different propositions to different segments if there is no “one size fits all” type of offer.  

✅ The tone

With just a tone, can you engage your recipient? Psychologists state that you make your message more understandable to your reader if you use positivity. Having a clear understanding increases customer motivation, increasing the chances of them making a purchase or continuing communications.

Think about your target audience and write a friendly, positive, and informative tone. Use A/B testing to determine which email body works best for you. Your click-throughs and purchases would increase with this strategy.

Here are some tactics to try:

• Check your message with a colleague after reading it aloud.
• Break it up into subsections and use bullet points.
• There is no need for big words.
• Keep it simple and friendly.
• Make people feel.
• Ask a few questions (no more than three).

✅ Call to action

In a call-to-action, users are motivated to take the next step by a button, hyperlink, or dynamic QR code. Use a secure QR code generator to ensure the QR codes you create are safe and reliable, adding an extra layer of trust for customers. To push your reader to click and proceed to your website before closing your email, use strong call-to-action phrases.

Furthermore, CTAs provide great value for marketers by helping them evaluate the success of their digital marketing campaigns, analyze the needs and preferences of their target audiences, and decide about the next step in the campaign.

Why Do Email Testing?

In a world where one in three email messages is never opened, it’s important to get your message out there. Testing is key to ensuring that your email gets the attention and opens on the devices, operating systems, and browsers it will be seen on. We’ll show you how to do email testing with GrowMeOrganic’s List Segmentation tool.

According to Constant Contact, about one-third of all emails are never opened. So how can you get your emails to be opened?

Well, email testing is the solution. With email testing, you’re able to send out test emails and do a variety of things such as:

• Check for spelling and grammar errors Test for compatibility with different devices on different Operating Systems.
• Understand how the email is going to look across different devices and browsers.
• Find out if your links are going to work out and go where they should.
• Test your message so that you can see if it was delivered properly, or if the recipient complained about it.

Conclusion

Email testing is critical for any business to ensure that their emails are delivered to the intended recipients and that their messages look professional and consistent across multiple email clients. With the growing importance of email in the digital world, email testing should not be overlooked. By testing emails, businesses can make sure their communication efforts are effective and successful, leading to improved customer engagement, increased sales, and better customer relations.

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