Moving The Needle with Split Testing

by Keith Browning

Which subject lines get the highest open rates in your email marketing campaigns? What time of the day and which days perform best?

Which headline gets the highest click thru’s on your PPC ad’s? How about the body text?

Which landing pages convert better?

These are just a small sample of the questions you can answer with Split Testing (or A/B Testing). And these answers can have a huge impact on your business, helping you attract more customers to your website, more often and helping convert more of them once they arrive on your site.

So what exactly is Split Testing? 

Essentially it is a simple way to work out which of two options is the most effective, by testing them against each other. By "options", I mean the likes subject lines, headlines, call to action buttons, landing pages etc. And by "effective", I mean in terms of having achieved a higher open rate, click thru, email newsletter sign up or conversion - or any of many possible metrics. In the case of email marketing, a simple way to increase the effectiveness of a campaign might be to split test two subject lines against each other. In this instance, you would take a small sample of your database and split this sample in to Group A (who would receive an email with Subject Line A) and Group B (who would receive an email with Subject Line B). If you find Group A had a 15% open rate and Group B had a 30% open rate, the campaign with Subject Line B is then sent to the entire database. 

Many email marketing providers like Mail Chimp or Newsweaver here in Ireland have these Split Testing features built in to their solutions, making it very easy to do.

Figure 1: Split Testing subject lines in email marketing campaigns

How much difference can Spit Testing make? In recent testing I performed for Irelandhotels.com, who have a database of 60,000+ customers, our lower performing emails sent during split testing were getting open rates of 13% and higher performing ones were getting 20%+. As we send emails on a weekly basis, this means an extra 16,800 customers see our emails each month just by split testing subject lines and achieving opening rates of 20% instead of 13%.

What a quick, easy and effective way to move the needle - and an easy way to get started with Split Testing!