B2B Monday Myth: I Don't Need to Test My Emails || Mascola B2B Marketing

B2B Monday Myth: I Don’t Need to Test My Emails

The Myth: I Don’t Need To Test My Emails

The Truth: A/B Testing Can Help You Turn Your Email Program Into a Lead-Converting Machine

You are likely among the 93% of B2B marketers who distribute content via email. But are you doing it right? If you’re not using A/B testing, there is likely room for improvement. A/B testing is one of the best ways to gain insights about your audiences, fine-tune your efforts over time, and increase open, click-through, and conversion rates.

It’s important to remember that when testing B2B emails, you can only test one thing at a time. If you do it all at once, you won’t know what caused your email to succeed. Or tank. And then you’ve lost a truly helpful tool.

Here are 5 different elements you should test to fine-tune your email program:

Subject Line. This is the big one. This is what gets people to open your emails. Does a question perform better than a statement? Does your core target audience appreciate humor? Or do they prefer you to get right to the point? Subject line tests can help answer those questions and increase your open rates.
Day of the Week/Time of Day. When you test this, do it when you’re not testing subject lines. Or any other elements. Send the exact same subject line, message, and layout to one half of your audience on Wednesday at 6am and the other half on Thursday at 6am (for example) to test day of the week. Then with an entirely different email, test Wednesday at 6am and Wednesday at noon, to determine time of day. This is something you’ll want to log and perfect over time. It’s not something you can determine with only one email blast.
Message. You’ve already tested subject lines, but what about the message once people open your emails? Which headlines perform the best? Which calls to action are people clicking on? Each individual copy element can be tested. But again, only one element at a time. Testing too many copy elements at once won’t tell you what you need to know.
Layout/Design. What happens when you change the order of your articles? The color of your calls to action? Each variant can change the outcome. Test each one until you find what works. Before you even begin testing, make sure that you are using responsive design. If your audience(s) can’t read your emails easily on their mobile phones, this will negatively affect your results, and your reporting on other testing elements will be skewed.
Type of Content. If you have a newsletter-style email promoting many different types of content, what performs the best? Do you have a higher CTR when you drive the audience to an infographic? A white paper? A blog post? Determine which kind of content your audience craves most — you might find it varies by segment.

Testing B2B emails takes time and patience. But in the long run it will help you give your audience what they want and take your leads further down the sales funnel. Email is one of the most important tools in the B2B toolkit. Get it right, and you’ll be miles ahead of your competitors.

Tags: A/B testing, content marketing, email design, email marketing, subject line testing, testing b2b emails