The Creative Challenge: Finding the Sweet Spot With A/B Testing for Email Marketing
Your medical marketing email campaign is formatted correctly, tested for errors and ready to go. How do you know if the creative choices you made will resonate with your target audience?
Rather than relying on a gut feeling, running A/B testing for email marketing can help guide strategic creative choices about subject lines, body copy and images to produce the best results. Your ultimate goal is to get the biggest return on investment for every message you send.
What is A/B testing?
A/B testing — also called split testing — is both an art and a numbers game.
The art of developing a successful medical marketing email campaign is grounded in the creative choices you make to bring your key messages to life. Based on your research, brand standards and marketing objectives, create two versions of your email message with an enticing mix of subject lines, headlines, visuals and calls to action. Now it’s time to test which elements hit the target.
That’s when the process of A/B testing kicks in, enabling you to produce measurable, comparative data. Simultaneously send the two email variations to two different subsets of your mailing list, and then compare the results to see which version performed better. You choose what metrics are most important to you, whether it be open rate, click-through rate, conversion rate or another data point. The top performer is then sent to the remaining contacts in your list.
What should I test?
You can test almost any aspect of your medical marketing email campaign to improve results, including:
Subject lines
Personalization
Content order
Length and tone of copy
Images
Calls to action
Buttons or text hyperlinks
It’s up to you to prioritize which elements are likely to make the most significant impact on your request of the reader. To test incremental changes, modify a single element between two versions. To explore more substantial improvements, test more dramatic creative variations in your campaigns.
Double test capabilities
With the NOWW Platform from MMS, you’re able to conduct multivariate testing to assess up to four variables at once (A/B/C/D testing). You can choose to test four variations of one element, such as the subject line, or create multiple versions of an email to test different layouts and content combinations. The latter option enables you to evaluate the impact of multiple changes to an email at one time.
For multivariate testing to be useful, it’s important to work with a large recipient list, so you have a sufficient quantity to assess each of the variations. There are a number of calculators available online to evaluate the statistical significance of your list and your number of variations.
Are you interested in learning more about NOWW Platform packages to decide which one works best for your team? Contact us today to set up a demo, or visit mmslists.com/noww-platform-matrix for more information.