How to improve your email open rates with marketing experiments: A step by step guide

Improving your email open rates can have a significant impact on your overall email marketing performance. By conducting marketing experiments, you can understand what factors influence your open rates and optimize your emails accordingly. Here’s a step-by-step guide:

Step 1: Define Your Goal

Your primary goal here is to increase email open rates, but it’s important to also consider secondary goals such as click-through rates, conversions, or sales.

Step 2: Identify Potential Variables for Testing

There are several elements of your emails that could potentially influence open rates. These could include the subject line, preview text, sender name, send time, or personalization.

Step 3: Develop Hypotheses

For each variable you’re testing, develop a hypothesis. For example, if you’re testing subject lines, your hypothesis could be: “Subject lines that pose a question will result in higher open rates than subject lines that make a statement.”

Step 4: Design Your Experiment

Design your experiment to test your hypotheses. This typically involves creating two versions of your email – a control version (A) and a variant version (B). The control version should be the current design or strategy, while the variant includes the proposed change.

Step 5: Implement Your Test

Using an email marketing platform that supports A/B testing, send the control version to one half of your audience and the variant to the other half. The distribution should be random to avoid bias.

Step 6: Collect and Analyze Data

Run the test for a sufficient period, then collect and analyze the data. Look at the open rates for both the control and variant versions of your email.

Step 7: Implement Changes

If your data shows a significant improvement in open rates with the variant, implement the changes in your email strategy. If there’s no clear winner, or if the control performed better, this might suggest that your hypothesis was incorrect or that there are other factors at play.

Step 8: Document and Share Results

Document the results of your experiment, including the hypothesis, the changes made, the results, and any conclusions drawn. Share these findings with your team so they can apply these learnings in their respective areas.

Step 9: Repeat the Process

Continually look for ways to improve your email open rates. Develop new hypotheses, run new tests, and implement the winning changes. This iterative process can help you consistently optimize your emails for better performance.

Remember, while improving open rates is important, it’s not the only measure of email marketing success. Be sure to also consider click-through rates, conversion rates, and other key performance indicators to get a complete picture of your email marketing performance.