What are the most effective email copy elements to test?

Testing your email copy is a crucial practice in the realm of email marketing, and it serves several key purposes in optimizing your campaigns for success. It allows you to gain valuable insights into your audience's preferences and behaviors. Testing enables you to uncover the elements that drive engagement and conversion. It helps you avoid costly mistakes that could harm your brand reputation or compromise the success of your campaigns. It empowers you to make data-driven decisions, enhance audience engagement, and ultimately achieve your email marketing goals by delivering content that resonates with your subscribers and drives meaningful actions.

In the past, I have embarrassed myself plenty with copy that clearly missed the mark. I became so focused on formality and the product, and found that my responses doubled when the copy had three things; Formality with personality, clarity, and asked open ended questions that were thought provoking. Testing your copy can help find your voice.

Why not? E-Mail is a powerful channel and there are several important KPIs that can be improved with strong copy. - open rate - click rate - CTOR - dwell time - response rate - click rate

It is very important to have the right greeting and personalise is as much as possible. Also make sure there is a proper opening and closing. And all required details pertaining to the subject are mentioned. However it should not be too long and call to action is very important.

Test your email copy to ensure that it has that element that connects with your target audience in true sense, conveys relevant message to them and turn them into your customer. If it convinces you to persuade then it is more likely to improve the conversion rate for your products/services.

One thing that is not noted here, DO NOT test more than one thing at a time. Otherwise you’ll never know which element made the difference. Prioritise what you want to test, and test different things on each email campaign.

Subject lines and opening lines are where you either get it right or wrong. Test them for sure. Typically the more 'authentic' and the less 'polished', the better...

Subject line is so important to test because this is often what will trigger someone to open your email but it’s also important it is relevant to the content of the email. Next would be email length - you’re only going to hold attention for so long so what is the optimum length before they take action. And the call to actions themselves test single versus multiple and different wording for optimising clickthroughs

You have to approach copy testing in email marketing through a scientific lense. You don't want extraneous variables like delivery date/time or audience messing your results up. Start with 1 single hypothesis PER email. Such as - I think this email will get more opens if we begin the subject line "Name, unlock great discounts now" vs "Unlock great discounts now" then split your segments randomly, either using the inbuilt functionality or by randomising your send list and splitting in two before sending. Key things to test: - Subject line syntax/structure - Subject line immediacy, i.e. words like 'now', 'fast', 'quick' etc. - CTA wording Testing even these properly will take a while, but once you've got your results try more.

List - what list is it? Wrong list - wrong result. Timing - which country so what time? Subject line - what's the best one? Preview panel - is it compelling? Non-openers - send again with a different subject line. Congruency, does the clicker land somewhere they expected? Video? Images? Links? Gifs? What are you using as the pattern interrupt? What font are you using? Is it easy to read? Where do you send it from? Corporate email or individual? What is is you want the recipient to do? Is this seamless for them to do it?

Most email platforms have built in AB testing. My recommendation for anyone is to use Klaviyo (my favourite platform by far!!) and AB test every single email. The way AB testing works is that it takes a small percentage of your audience, splits that group down the middle (or more if you’re testing more than one idea) and the winning creative gets sent to the rest. It’s pretty cool, I love seeing the results. Also, expect them to never go your way 😂

Testing is okay, but not if you overthink this. People reading emails and interacting with your content is the ultimate goal, and you can’t achieve it if you spend too much time worrying about whether to ask a question or use an emoji in the subject line. So, just send that email. If it's not good enough, try something else. When it performs better than expected, try to figure out why. Replicate to see if it works again. Then try something new anyway because no trend lasts forever in email marketing.

Split your list and send one version of your email to half, and another version to the rest. See which one performs better, and that's your winner.

Test it with a free tool like hubspot, mailchimp or any other email sender tools like mail meteor (extension for gmail). Also, don't make the mistake of testing multiple things at a time if you don't have a huge sample size (i.e., in the beginning!) > test one thing at a time.

Ensure your list is both large enough and segmented enough. Large enough because some email marketing tools will not run your test if it's not under a certain size (nor will you be able to easily achieve statistical significance), and segmented enough because *relevant messaging is everything.* If you're testing email copy and it's only going to align with a certain subset of readers, obviously the cohort that includes that subset of readers will perform better.

The best practice for testing your email copy is not to test everything simultaneously. It's challenging to know what's working when running too many tests. For example, you can test your open rates with different subject lines for one test and then test your email copy for another test.

You should absolutely test, but only test one thing at a time. For example, if you test a subject line; a from name; and the color of the CTA button all at once, you're not going to know what contributed to an increase in clicks or opens. And you might as well not test if that's what you're doing. Test just one of those with as broad a group as you can. By the way, testing to a small sample of under 100 people or so also won't really show you anything. You need a large group in order to see the results clearly.

Continuous testing is crucial when it comes to email copy optimization. Our audience are becoming savvier these days and their preferences differs depending on their stage in the customer journey. I agree that we must test one element at a time so that we can identify the exact variable that matters most 👍

Pleeeeease make sure not to test more than one element at once. You can test the same element in multiple ways, eg. 3-4 different subject lines, but don’t test subject lines and CTA’s cos you’ll never know the true answer.

You may think email is fairly limited in what you can test, but that's far from true. Break down your tests into buckets: do you want to test creative, copy, personalization, design, targeting, or CTAs? Within each, you can experiment with many different ideas, from tone and length of copy to positioning of the CTA button to the segmentation of the email list you're sending to. Some simple ideas to try: - Secondary CTAs - can you provide customers another option if the main CTA doesn't resonate? - Copy personalization - can you speak to a customer's specific need or behavior? - Subject lines - can you create intrigue or urgency so customers open the email? - Targeting - instead of one-size-fits-all, can you tailor the email for a group?

There are some incredible resources online for how to test email copy and what to test. First point - go to your email platform, they’ll usually have loads of resources on the topic.

If you're sending emails about discounts/promotions or offers, test percentage savings vs monetary saving: - Save 10% on *thing* for a limited time only vs - Get £10 off on *thing* for a limited time only Test various CTA wording on your link buttons, i.e. "Learn more" vs "Take me there" vs "Let's go" etc. Test urgency in subject lines, i.e. "Time is running out to save on xyx" vs "There's still time to save on xyz" And remember to only ever test ONE variable per email for reliable results!

Say you've got a promo email. Test sending it with a picture of the product vs. a customer testimonial. Which one leads to more sales? That's the keeper.

Open rate: Test word vs. number in subject line CTR: Test different colors of CTA button CTOR: Test different intro lines / different heading sizes / numbered vs. unnumbered

Nobody mentioned subject lines! Start there. You need people to open the email, don't you. Then, test 1 thing at a time. Pro tip: Try sprinkling some humor or adding a personalized video. And thank me later 😉.

As soon as I started writing emails that an actual human wrote instead of just bland emails from a Corporate account (adding my name, fun subject lines, including why I found the copy interesting), open rates and click rates sky-rocketed. No one was reading emails from "Corporate Communications" with "Latest news" as the subject line, but emails from my actual inbox with subject lines like "There was a lot of cake on site this week" or "July is almost over. Does anyone else feel like the year is flying by?" I was getting so much more interaction with my emails.

Copy is only as good as the understanding behind it. If you don't know who your customer is, what they respond to, and what they're interested in then STOP. You could spend ages writing something that you find appealing but find your target audience doesn't care. Make sure your copy is talking to the customer you are trying to reach. Ask yourself: - How formal/informal should you be? - What writing style do they respond to? - What media does your audience already read and is influenced by? If it's your first campaign, go with an educated guess and then use testing to drill down into what your customer cares about.

What about tact? Have you the copywriter put your words through a tact filter? Do you understand what tact is? I’ve received many emails from companies and brands that just rub me the wrong way- like from the get-go. Say what you need to say but do it in a tactful way. Words have power. Use them tactfully.

Just because an A/B test worked and achieved higher opens or higher clicks, that doesn't mean it's the right decision to start using that variant. Consider open rates - "Quick, your mother is in the hospital!" will probably get a high response rate, but you'll be annoying customers and impacting trust, and your conversion rate will be low. Make sure to look beyond the immediate measurable results - okay, the CTA got more clicks, but did it also drive more sales - or were people disappointed when they arrived on the landing page because we'd over-promised or misled them?