Split-testing emails is the only way to statistically prove which email campaign brings you the most success in terms of the goals you’ve laid out. It’s also the fastest way to figure out what your audience likes so that you can optimize your email campaigns accordingly.
If you want to see real results with your email campaigns, you have to perform split testing experiments and make optimizations to increase the revenue generated by your email marketing endeavors.
In this article, we are sharing a guide on how to split test your email marketing campaigns according to Reinis Krumins, the Co-founder of Agency JR. This email marketing agency has generated over $20 000 000 in sales for e-commerce brands including BikTrix, Singapore's PE company running Eubi Shorts, Thousand Miles, The biggest TikTok spenders in the German Markets, Floris GDG, and others.
Reinis explains how to split test emails in a way that will allow you to optimize and earn more revenue from your online business.
Reinis Krumins
Email split testing is the action of sending 2 different versions of your email to 2 different sample groups of your email list. The email that receives the most opens, clicks, and conversions (“the winning email”) will be sent out to the rest of your subscribers and the other one that was outperformed won’t be sent anymore.
The Types Of Split Tests
There are 2 kinds of split tests for email marketing according to Reinis;
- General Direction tests
- The 1% Optimizations
General direction tests are macro tests, like offers whereas 1% optimizations are exactly what it sounds like — button layout, and button color. Today we'll be talking more about the latter.
Preparation
Before you start running any email split tests, you need to do two things:
- Set your goal
- Create a hypothesis
Setting your goal
Your goal is the northern star. It's always what you aim for and it may be more sales from emails, a higher abandoned checkout recovery rate, etc.
You need to identify your main goal and then figure out where you are currently and how far you want to go in the direction of that goal.
An example of a goal can be:
Increasing the abandoned checkout recovery rate from 6.3% to 8.2%. (Roughly a 32% increase)
Once you've set a clear goal, you then need to create a hypothesis
Hypothesis
A hypothesis is a set of underlying assumptions on how an action is expected to play out in a given context. Hypotheses force individuals to articulate in advance why they believe a given course of action will succeed. Before running email marketing split tests, we need to come up with hypotheses that will let us know which actions will lead to success. For example;
- Sending more emails will increase the recovery rate
- Personalizing content for buyers vs. non-buyers will increase the recovery rate
- Offering discounts will increase the recovery rate
- Adding more buttons to the emails
Not all hypotheses are created equal. Some are easier to execute than others and some may damage your branding, for instance, aggressive discounting.
So now you need to rank the possible split tests you can run. You can discuss the different split tests and their perceived effectiveness with your team, so you can get feedback before starting any tests.
Executing the Split Tests
Now it's time to run the split tests. This is fairly simple to do on Klaviyo with conditional splits & other testing features. However, what matters more is your split-testing mindset. It's easy to get attached to an idea and run ineffective split tests without knowing it. If you have a hypothesis — your goal isn't to prove it right, but it's to prove it wrong. If you can't prove it wrong, only then you know it's right.
Another hole people fall into is running too many tests at a time. If you compare 2 completely different emails, you have no clue what worked and what didn't. That's why you always have to run 1 test at a time. If you're testing button colors — just test button colors and don't change ANYTHING else. Also if you don't prioritize and run separate split tests, you won't know what's working and what's not
Pro Tip: Use a CRO calculator to see when you hit statistical significance. That way you know when you can move on to the next split test.
7 Email Marketing Split Testing Areas
Below are the 7 key areas that Reinis suggests all email marketers should test to optimize their email marketing campaigns and increase their earnings:
- Subject Line + Preview Text
The subject line and preview text are very important elements of an email to test. They determine the open rate of your emails which will later determine whether your email will bring more conversions or none at all. Emails with a low open rate are not worthwhile so you need to make sure that you test your subject line and preview text to get the combination(s) that will give you a higher open rate first. Then you can later test for conversions.
The products you promote in your email may be worth testing to see which one will appeal more to your email. Sometimes the subscribers may be interested in purchasing a complimentary product to the main one that you sell on your website. So it's always important to test complimentary products instead of only reselling the main product.
- Email Style (Design VS HTML)
The email style may be a key element to test in your email. Some emails convert better with original designs and others may convert better with HTML emails because of the advanced appearance. So you need to test these to know what works for your audience.
Here, you can test the placements of your CTA buttons within the email. They may be placed in the middle of the message or at the bottom of the message. Both placements will give you different results and that's why it's important to test them.
The number of CTA buttons you add to your email message may influence the conversion rates of your emails. Some emails may convert better when there are 2 or 3 CTA buttons in the email because of the numerical advantage and in some emails, having more than 1 CTA button may affect the reading experience of your subscribers hence they won't be clicking on them.
- Pricing (Displayed or Hidden)
The results you get from displaying your product's price in your emails or not displaying the price may differ distinctively. Displaying the price may give you a low CTR on the email but a high conversion rate on the website whereas not displaying the price, may give you a high CTR on the email and a low conversion rate on the website.
You need to test both formats to see what will yield more results for you.
The CTA button color may highly influence the CTR of your email campaigns which eventually affects the number of conversions you generate on your site. CTA colors need to match the entire emotion set by the theme of your email and as a marketer, it's not easy to determine exactly what specific emotions your message might trigger from your readers. Therefore it's important to test CTA button colors and then optimize and run the color that performs best overall.
Conclusion
To wrap up, split-testing your email campaigns is essential for grasping what works and reaching your goals. It swiftly reveals audience preferences, refines your email strategy, and boosts results and revenue. This article provides a practical guide to successful split testing, drawing from Reinis Krumins' expertise as Co-founder of Agency JR. Their track record of propelling over $20 million in sales for various e-commerce brands underscores the revenue-boosting potential of optimizing your email approach using these insights.
