Email A/B Testing Is Now Available: 5 Ideas for What to Test

The Omnisend team is firmly following their ambitious plan, and today we’re introducing A/B testing for your email campaigns!

This new feature will enable you to easily test your email campaign and improve your marketing performance with these smart, small tweaks.

What Is A/B Testing?

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Omnisend built an easy-to-use feature to help you get to know your audience better and achieve better email marketing results. Thanks to A/B testing, you can check which sender’s name, sender’s email address or subject line works better for your campaign. A/B testing helps you to test it out on an initial small group of subscribers and then Omnisend will send the better version to the rest of the recipients.

How Does It Work?

Let’s say you want to test which subject line would perform better for your next summer sale campaign.

So you start the A/B test, enter two different versions of subject lines (version A and version B), choose the number of subscribers to send the initial test to and you launch the campaign.

The open rate is the metric that indicates the quality of the subject line, so that the higher the open rate, the more successful the version. Omnisend calculates the initial results and sends the entire campaign using the subject line with the better open rate.

For more information on how to set this up, read our Knowledge Base.

5 Ideas for Email A/B Testing

On Omnisend you can test the subject line, sender’s name and sender’s email address. These are ideas for testing in particular:

1. Test the subject lines with a different discount to see if % or $ signs work better for your subscribers.
2. Test the same subject line with and without emojis. You will get valuable insight into how your subscribers react to emojis. If positively, emojis will help you get noticed every time you email your list.
3. Test subject lines with the subscriber’s name included and without. See for yourself if using the name works better. Don’t forget to review your list of subscribers to see if all the names that the subscribers have entered are valid. Sometimes people enter just “qwerty” instead of their real names. In this case it would be better to just delete the entry and leave only the email address.
4. Try different versions of subject lines, ones indicating the limited time offer and ones without it. You’ll understand if your subscribers react to this kind of pressure to click on the email and buy.
5. Test if sending email campaigns from a person or using your business name generates better open rates. The same could be tested with the sender’s addresses – test a general business email address (e.g. [email protected]) vs. your personal one ([email protected]).

When Should I Start Doing A/B Testing?

A/B testing can come in handy when planning your email campaigns. Knowing which sender’s name looks more credible to your subscribers or what kind of subject lines are more attractive for your business community can improve your marketing efforts significantly.

However, A/B testing won’t be effective for very small businesses that have only a few hundred subscribers. This is because the testing group would be too small and not generate significant representative numbers. The Omnisend marketing team suggests having at least 2000 contacts and splitting it 25% for A, 25% for B and 50% for the winning campaign. This way you can be sure about the accuracy of your results.

For ecommerce beginners with fewer than 2000 subscribers, we recommend you try our unique Campaign Booster. This feature allows you to change the subject line after the initial campaign and send the campaign again to non-openers. Resending the campaign will improve your performance by up to 30% percent and will be a step forward to better sales.