We A/B tested our marketing emails and uncovered 3 essential tips to improve performance

Ashden Walker Feb 1, 2022 2:07:20 PM

Email marketing is a common marketing channel for most businesses. You’ve captured the information from your prospective buyers and can now send emails that a) keep your brand front of mind, and b) remind them of your product/service’s features and benefits.

Now the next challenge begins - getting them to open and read the email to take action. Does your email have an engaging subject line? Does it have personality? Is there a strong call-to-action? We analyzed our own VideoScribe email performance to produce this guide on how you can get your marketing emails opened and read! Read on to see how our emails stacked up.

We all know an email should contain a catchy subject line, body content, a call-to-action and of course, an unsubscribe option. To start we looked at our subject lines.

Test 1: Optimizing email subject lines

We write our subject lines in a friendly tone that summarizes the purpose of the email and evokes excitement. See what we mean:

Email-subject-lines

We ran an A/B test comparing personalized subject lines against generic subject lines. One variation used the subscriber’s first name at the start or end of the subject line and our tests found that this personalization improved our open rate by 38%. Now, all our emails include subject line personalization. Therefore, tip 1 is: always use personalization in your marketing email subject line.

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Test 2: Personalizing creative elements

Next, we looked at our body content and tested the way we position our GIFs and videos in situ of the content. As VideoScribe is a visual product, we try to include visual elements within all of our emails. This test took the learnings from our subject line tests to see whether our subscribers would engage more with personalized creative.

personalized-gif-compare

By running a personalized creative test, we saw our click rate increase by 117%. Tip 2: include personalized creative wherever possible.

Test 3: Streamlining call-to-action buttons

A call-to-action (CTA) in an email is just like bread and butter - you can’t have one without the other. When you want to direct subscribers to action, a CTA is used. Whether that’s to read your latest blog, download a research paper or contact the sales team, a CTA encourages this action. We tested short succinct messages against more elaborate messages in our CTAs. This test proved that our succinct messages work best for our audiences.

CTA-results

With that in mind, tip 3 is: use succinct CTA copy to drive the strongest engagement.

By conducting various A/B tests, we were able to identify what works best for our brand. We recognize that all audiences behave in different ways, but one key takeaway that we believe is universal across all sectors is… personalization is key. Personalizing the subject line, adding in a sign off from the sender, personalizing the creative - these are all small techniques that can be used to drive greater email engagement.

Want to create a personalized video for your prospective customers? Sign up to your free 7 day trial of VideoScribe today!