When launching an email marketing campaign, a best practice is to employ A/B testing. It helps you determine the effectiveness of different email messages, designs and subject lines.
Most marketing automation systems provide this capability. We routinely do A/B testing using SalesFUSION, our marketing automation platform. In our A/B testing process, we either use two separate HTML emails and or two separate email subject lines, or alternate between them. As a result, half of the targeted group will receive an A or B email.
Recently we incorporated a different use case for A/B testing, where our client wanted to determine whether there was any preference when a potential registrant arrived at a generic landing page with limited branding, or when they arrived at a their fully branded landing page.
The results were quite dramatic. We found that there was a clear preference for the fully branded landing page by a factor or 3:1 over the generic landing page.
To summarize, from this example we learned:
- There was a high preference for responding to a branded landing page
- We can use A/B testing to measure landing page preferences
- By investing extra time to test our client’s hypothesis, it ultimately paid off by providing us with insights/metrics to advise our client on how their landing pages were being received
In today’s hyper competitive email marketing environment, testing is an essential success factor and should become a best practice to gain insights and confidence for increasing your registration outcomes.
Mike