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How Can I Use A/B Testing To Improve My Email Marketing Results?
Episode 24125th December 2024 • The Email Marketing Show • Email Marketing Heroes
00:00:00 00:13:49

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Do you want more people to open, click, and buy from your emails? 

This week, the spotlight is on A/B testing and how we can use it to improve our open rates, clicks and conversions so that we can maximise the sales from our email marketing.

Let’s do this!

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Want more? Let's say you're a course creator, membership site owner, coach, author, or expert and want to learn about the ethical psychology-based email marketing that turns 60-80% more of your newsletter subscribers into customers (within 60 days). If that's you, then The Email Hero Blueprint is for you.

This is hands down the most predictable, plug-and-play way to double your earnings per email subscriber. It allows you to generate a consistent sales flow without launching another product, service, or offer. Best news yet? You won't have to rely on copywriting, slimy persuasion, NLP, or ‘better' subject lines.

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Transcripts

00:00.67

Kennedy Kennedy

Exactly how can you use A B testing to improve your email marketing results? I'm going to share with you some really cool techniques that I've never heard anybody talk about that I'm using pretty much every single day to get my emails, to make more sales, get to limit and get more open and make more sales. Right. And we'll share with you in today's episode. I think this is a good one.

00:45.12

Kennedy Kennedy

Hello, welcome to the show. Happy email marketing Wednesday. Kennedy here with you. If you're brand new to the show, you're very welcome. We do this every single Wednesday. We call it email marketing Wednesday. If you hit subscribe on your podcast player right now, you've just discovered the show. Hit subscribe and it means the new episode will download your play. You'll not miss an episode, which will be amazing. So welcome to the show. And we are talking about um how you use this thing called A-B testing.

01:08.73

Kennedy Kennedy

to improve these results of email marketing. So there's lots of people talking about AAB testing. A lot of people have a different thought on AAB testing and what that means. What I really mean by AAB testing is testing different variations of an email and then backing the winner, sending the winner of those variations to the majority of people. so And this is all about using actual data rather than theory, rather than science, rather than psychology, rather than anything, rather than your experience. Using the actual data or the actual facts to get better open rates, more clicks, click-through rate going up, and more sales from your emails. And this is something I do almost every single day. Like, there's a couple of occasions when I haven't done this, but seriously, pretty much every single day, this is what I'm doing.

01:59.54

Kennedy Kennedy

which allows me to get more of my emails delivered so more people see them. I get my open rates are like through the roof, more people are clicking on my links and make them, of course, more sales from emails. So this is the sort of process that I go through, but I highly recommend the thing that I test pretty much every single day is the subject line. Okay.

02:21.50

Kennedy Kennedy

And that's the thing I mostly AB test. I rarely, rarely do a test on anything other than the subject line. Other things you could test might be how does including an image or not including an image in that email affect the click-through rate and of course the conversion rate of the author. So if you're, what you can do in most platforms is you can run an AB test on ah the subject line or on the email content, right? Now the two things that let you usually choose from on most platforms. So I usually almost always do it on on the subject line um and I have, I don't even know if I've ever done, I probably have at some point, but I can't think of an exact example of when I've done it with the body copy.

03:07.12

Kennedy Kennedy

or anything that's in the email. But here's an example of when you might do that before I go into my my actual process of split testing subject lines and what I actually do, because it's a little bit unusual. it's it's It's not your sort of common wisdom of what most people are doing, and it has had a profound impact on our sales on through email. But before that, here's a really cool thing you could do. If you're running an offer,

03:29.40

Kennedy Kennedy

And let's say it's um you know it's a course okay or a membership or something like a digital program, which is what most of you guys do. um You could do a test. I would even do a test. In fact, I'm going to do a test. I'm going to say it now. I'm going to do this test. I'm putting it out there.

03:45.55

Kennedy Kennedy

where in one of the emails include an image of the course, like you know the graphics of the course, and in another variation, don't include the graphics for the course, and see which one gets a higher click-through rate. That would be really interesting to know. So here's how I set up my AAB test. When I'm doing it for subject lines, I would do the same sort of setup for that kind of test with the body copy as well. Again, you could try a different like opening line, you could try having your logo at the top and not having your logo at the top, you could try all these different things to do with your A-B tests. But here's here's my process, is I will send variation A. Well, let me just take you through the process from beginning to end. So I write my email first, that's the first thing. Don't write the subject line first, write the email first. So I'm not trying to squeeze the content of my email around this subject line I've come up with. That's the worst way around to do it. So write the email first. Next, I write the A subject line. So I write a subject line,

04:45.81

Kennedy Kennedy

that I think will work. Then, and here's the really cool bit, is I go to a GPT that I've been training since, I think February, something like that, for months and months and months, right? And um I've been training it to beat my subject lines and the subject lines of other, and I've been training on other people's subject lines, of like professional copywriters. And i I paste, literally copy and paste the email into this GPT, and it comes up with five different subject lines. And I choose the best one of those.

05:14.24

Kennedy Kennedy

right In fact, if you want to go and use this GPT, here's a link for you. Just go and get it. All you need is a free chat GPT account. You don't even need a paid one, right? Just go to emailmarketingheroes dot.com slash subject, emailmarketingheroes.com slash subject, and you'll be able ah adapt you'll able to like get instant access to my ah subject line AI that I've been training. The same one I use every day, like literally the same one.

05:36.11

Kennedy Kennedy

ah And so I put in, so I basically, I select in the, in the, in the email client, uh, in the email builder, I'll select, I'm going to do an AB test. I'm going to do an AB test of the subject line. And I'm going to test, ah subject line A is going to be the one that I write. And subject line B is going to be my top pick of the one that my GPT has written, that my AI has written. And this is, these are the conditions that I use. I get it to send subject line A.

06:06.32

Kennedy Kennedy

to 10% of the list and subject line B to the other 10% of the list. So I'm basically doing a split test. I'm doing the test on 20% of my entire list, Then I have it wait four hours.

06:24.02

Kennedy Kennedy

Okay, I feel like that's the shortest amount of time you should really wait for an email split test. um Most emails get opened within the first hour, actually within the first few minutes of you sending them, so that is that's a good thing. um So I'll wait four hours and then it automatically will send the winner to the remaining 80% of the list of that segment that you've chosen. I'm going, and so but but to choose the winner,

06:50.100

Kennedy Kennedy

I almost always, if there's a call to action in the email, like, hey, go register for this webinar, or hey, go check out this sales video. If there is a direct call to action in that email, I will have it pick the winner by click-through rate.

07:07.56

Kennedy Kennedy

not open rate because what I have seen, and this is crazy, but I have seen emails that have a higher open rate have a lower click-through rate because it must be to do with the level of intention, the mindset, the the the psychological frame that somebody comes into that email with.

07:25.03

Kennedy Kennedy

So if there's a call to action, I will have it pick the winner of the split test based on click-through rate. If there's not a call to action, maybe I'm doing a belief-building email where the value is just inside the email, my signature might still be in there, my super signature that thing might still be in there, but there's actually the main email itself does not have a call to action. I will have it pick the winner based on open rate. Okay?

07:47.37

Kennedy Kennedy

So that's how I set it up. So it's my subject line that I've written versus the best AI one that I could see. I haven't tested that to 20% on the list. 10% on the list get subject line A, my one. 10% on the list get subject line B, the AI one. And then after four hours, based on, let's say, the click-through rate, whichever one gets the highest click-through rate, it's going to send the winner out to the rest of the list.

08:15.63

Kennedy Kennedy

By doing that every single day, it means that 80% of the list get the most effective subject line. And it absolutely kills. But then there is one extra thing that I do. And here and this makes a huge difference.

08:32.43

Kennedy Kennedy

So this is my process. And I actually did a full video. If you want to see me do this, um I show you it on screen and I go through it all in detail in a video that's inside of the of our free Facebook group. So go to Facebook search for the email marketing show community. And you'll see me go through this. It's in the thing about how I actually send a newsletter every single day. and So just go to Facebook search for the email marketing show community, you'll see me do this on screen. But what I do is I do that split test, but I only send the split test to the people who on my list who have opened an email within the last seven days. So I basically, for my newsletter segment of my list, I have two smart lists, two segments. One is newsletter seven days and what is called newsletter eight plus days.

09:24.25

Kennedy Kennedy

And basically, the seven days of people who've all opened an email from me in the within the last seven days, seven days or less, yesterday, two days, six days ago, seven days ago, five years, like that. And then the other segment is people who are on my newsletter who have not opened an email in the last seven days, but it's been eight or more days.

09:42.32

Kennedy Kennedy

So what I actually do is the split testing process I've just talked you through is what I send to my seven day or lesson gauges. So 10% of those people get subject line A, 10% get subject line B, the winner of those two, um that 80% goes to the rest of the people who've engaged within the last seven days.

10:05.30

Kennedy Kennedy

Then, because I know it's going to happen four hours later, what I'm going to do five hours later, later on that day, is I'm going to go in, have a look at which subject line won, and I'm going to send that email. So duplicate the email with the winning subject line. And I'm going to send that, that email to the people who have engaged in eight plus days.

10:27.40

Kennedy Kennedy

What that means is the people who are least engaged, who haven't opened an email from me in the last seven in the in last seven days, it's been eight or more days, they get the winning subject line. It also means a whole bunch of deliverability things I'm not going to do a day, but it really um increases the deliverability. It means that you're you're you're actually sending to or your most engaged people first, which is is really good for deliverability as well. And it's got a whole but whole host of of all of um on of knock on effect. So that's the process of how you can use A B testing to improve those email marketing results. If there is a call to action, make sure that really important that you base the winner of a split test based on click through rate and not on open rate. So that is that one for you. And now it is time for this week's

11:22.80

Kennedy Kennedy

There you go, this week's subject line of the week. Here's your new, the show, by the way, every single week, I pull up one of the subject lines I've sent over the last little while and sort of ah use this section of the show to tell you about why it's why it worked so well. I know people are obsessed with but subject lines, aren't they? Okay. So, um the the subject line that I'm going to go with is 70 billion views.

11:49.51

Kennedy Kennedy

70 billion views and then the shocked emoji. I've been talking about emojis over recent time. I don't use emojis in a lot of emails, but I do use them every now and again, just again to get attention in a different way. So the reason this works is it is a massive number.

12:07.62

Kennedy Kennedy

but But also we're not telling them views of what? Is it of a page? Is it of an offer? Is it a video? Right? 70 billion views. And then it's a shocked emoji. So I'm telling them how I feel about it. It's shocked. And again, you could put the word shocked in there because there is an ambiguity about the word shocked or the shocked emoji. Are you shocked in a good way? Are you shocked in a bad way?

12:32.15

Kennedy Kennedy

Right? If I said this is shocking, it's not a good subject line, right? Because they don't know if that means good or bad. Okay? So um that's the subject line of the week. It's 70 billion views. Notice the specificity of 70. It would be better if it was exactly like, you know, 72 billion or something like that. um But by the way, the email was about the fact that there were 70 billion views of YouTube shorts every single day.

12:58.69

Kennedy Kennedy

and because I was doing a promotion for a thing about video and talking about the importance of video. So there you go, 70 billion views after this week's subject line of the week. I hope you've enjoyed today's episode. If you do want to go and check out my subject line AI, just go to emailmarketingheroes.com slash subject and literally paste emails into it and it will write some non-formulaic subject lines that you can use that are based on basically at the end of each month I go in there and put in the results of my split tests so that it continues to learn um how to write even better. So it's constantly getting better at writing absolutely kick ass subject lines. That's what you should go do. Cool. I will be back here next week. So if you haven't already hit subscribe in your podcast player, you are risking missing out next week. You don't want to do that. We're going to crack an episode. All right. I will see you next week.

13:48.05

Kennedy Kennedy

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