Recently I ran a handful of email marketing split tests.
Rather than keep the results to myself I thought you might find them useful so I wrote them up in a short PDF report.
Watch the video first for an overview then download the PDF below…
🔗Links:
- Free Copy Of The Hook Book – Stand out in your crowded market & make your competitors irrelevant
I’d love to hear your feedback so please do drop a comment below. Cheers, Rob 🙂
Thanks very much Rob.
This will be very helpful!
Great Kobus thanks for letting me know and great to see you here on the blog 🙂
Very interesting thank you for sharing Rob. The second day of frost your root veg should be good
Yes, job not done yet! Thanks for your comment John 🙂
Great stuff as usual Rob, thanks for sharing. My nano product launch is looming and I’ve been drafting the email swipes so this is particularly relevant to me.
Interesting the keep it simple approach seems to often win, i.e. regular text over a button, regular link over an image.
Been reading a number of sources lately saying you shouldn’t hide your domain registration details with privacy protection as some email service providers view this as an activity associated with spammers (who have something to hide) so it can hit your email deliverability rate. Of course the flip side to this is if you don’t hide your domain registration details you yourself can be a target for spammers when they scrape Whois! Bit of a rock and a hard place that one! Seems to be ICANN, Whois and GDPR have been trying to come to an agreement re what is publicly available on Whois for some time!
As you’ve had a frost, if you are growing sprouts feel free to send some down the A30/A35/A27 to West Sussex! 🙂 We’ve only just binned the runner beans, went on forever this year! 🙂
Craig.
Thank you for your feedback Craig and I hope your launch is progressing well.
I have not heard about the privacy protection stuff. Perhaps a virtual office address would help if it is a widespread problem? I have a very simple set up using ActiveCampaign, no DKIM or SPF or anything fancy and my delivery rates seem pretty good (c.25% open rates as you can see in the PDF). So I don’t really worry too much about these things. Maybe I’m being a little flippant but this approach seems to have worked fairly well over the years.
Yes, simple approach does seem to work well and, as I say in the report, the gains are small anyway which shows if you just wanted to ignore all tactics you can do so with the comfort that you’re not missing much anyway. This is one of the benefits of split testing – it helps us to understand what NOT to worry about!
Thanks for your valuable comment Craig 🙂
P.S. I do have a crop of sprouts – too early to harvest yet though!
Thanks Rob, interesting results.
Thank you Mark 🙂
Hi Rob, I know you say some of the results are significant (and I do see some differences) but what was the sample size as I don’t see that?
Hi Robert, thanks for your question. Sample sizes vary from 7K-14K depending upon the test.
Hi Rob,
Interesting (and useful) content as usual – Thanks. Certainly interesting the difference that seemingly small changes make.
You’re very kind Gordon, thank you and glad you found it of interest 🙂
Thanks for more of your truly valuable content, Rob.
I found myself wondering what the result of ‘The Shopping Cart’ email would have been if you’d used a shopping cart image [which is what my brain automatically went looking for] rather than an image promoting the video about the shopping cart.
This led me to think more on the significance of the image directly reflecting the main point of the email in the mind of the reader.
I know sometimes if you place an image of a ‘pretty woman’ in whatever the email is about, it can have a statistically significant impact on open rates – not a practice I agree with btw.
This is something I’ve been practicing with in my own weekly newsletter – getting the image to fully and clearly represent the main point in the newsletter that week.
It’s interesting to note the increase in open rates – rule of thumb to date as I don’t know how to use split-testing software – when I closely reflect what I think my subscribers are looking for based on the headline and opening line.
Glad you liked it Craig and thank you very much for posting your thoughts. I think there are so many little tests we can do (type and relevancy of image is one of these as you say) but a lot of it is just using common sense. Especially as the tests in the PDF seem to indicate relatively small differences in the open/click rates, suggesting all of this could be ignored without any major impact (this is a great takeaway in itself from the tests in my view). So there is a good case to say just focus on sending out good content and do what feels right for each email. Perhaps no need to learn that split testing software after all? Thanks again, Rob.