Unveiling the Impact of Subject Lines:

Last week, I wrote about optimizing your Welcome Email Sequence, and I received a few questions from some of my readers. One reader was overwhelmed by where to start in the process of improving her email marketing.

Megan and I traded a few emails about her business situation and decided to turn her confusion into a coaching opportunity.

Here’s the process I use to spin up an A/B Test Project.

The Process:

1. Understand the Situation

2. Define Goals

3. Develop the Plan

4. Create the Assets

5. Collect the Success Metrics

6. Analyze the Results

7. Define Next Steps

1. Understand The Situation.

Megan’s company is in its growth phase and is looking to maximize the impact of the marketing. Her company operates very lean and everyone wears multiple hats. While their overall KPI’s aren’t bad, they need to increase their ROI and become more effective and efficient with their email marketing.

Megan’s big questions:

• How do I increase customer engagement with my emails so it maximizes the efforts it takes to create and send our emails?

• How do I increase the revenue we acquire from our email marketing so my ROI is improved?

ACTION: Define and understand your situation. Get clear about what are your pain points, and what is most important to your business.

2. Define Goals.

I know we need to hit Megan’s two pain points - increase engagement and revenue. Anytime I’m looking at engagement issues, I start by looking at the Open Rates. By increasing the Open Rates, we have an opportunity to bring customers into the marketing funnel and guide them towards a revenue producing opportunity.

Megan was averaging 23% Open Rates on her email campaigns. Our goal was to increase her open rates by 50%. We set a target Open Rate goal of 34.5% for our test. We would measure the effectiveness of the emails by tracking opens, click-throughs, and revenue of the email campaign.

ACTION: Set Your Goal. Define what you will be testing, your measurable goal(s), and how you will collect the data to evaluate success metrics.

3. Develop the Plan. 

Megan had a product set to launch and had already created an email campaign to accompany her new product. Our plan was simple - use the email campaign exactly as it was created and only change the Subject Line to test the effectiveness of the Subject line on the Open Rate.

Megan, like many small companies, was not set up for efficiency or with an eye on scaling her marketing strategy. Since she had a very small email list, we got her set up with a free Klaviyo account. This will allow us to track metrics and create automations that will make her marketing more effective in the future.

Once we were set up with Klaviyo, we created the email campaign with an A/B test. We did a 50/50 sample split and the only difference between the two campaigns was the Subject Line.

ACTION: Develop the plan. Define the details of the plan and ensure that the plan will be executed to show how the goals were met or not.

4. Create the Assets

The product she was launching, was a Custom Engraved Fantasy-themed Bracelet that was inspired by the One Ring from Lord of the Rings.

Since we were testing the Subject Line, the only assets we were creating were new copy assets. The guidelines we use for Subject Line copy is:

1. 9 words or less

2. 60 characters or less

3. Elicit a response of Curiosity, Urgency, Value, Relevance or Emotion

We brainstormed many subject lines and after a few rounds of approvals, we ended up with a new subject line to test against their existing subject line.

ACTION: Create the assets. No matter what you are testing always make sure you create with an intent and purpose. The goal is to test what motivates your customers to perform an intended action. Be specific and intentional.

5. Collect the Success Metrics

Since we were using Klaviyo collecting our email data was quite easy to review a report on the email campaign and see the differences in the A/B metrics. Whichever email management system you use, make sure your collect the data for each email campaign in the test so you can analyze the information

ACTION: Measure your results. Gather the data you defined as part of the testing plan.

6. Analyze the Results

The Original Email Campaign

• Open Rate: 20.9%

• Clickthrough rate: 3.3%

• Revenue: $X.XX (hidden at the request of the client)

The Modified Subject Line Email Campaign:

• Open Rate: 53.6%

• Clickthrough rate: 3.1%

• Revenue: Nearly 3X the original email campaign

How did we do?

Open Rate: We saw a significant increase and exceeded our goal of 34.5%

Revenue: A nearly 3X improvement in overall revenue. This was caused by the increased traffic in the sales funnel from the higher Open Rate.

ACTION: Analyze your results. Compare your results with your goals. Did you receive clear and actionable data? If not, rinse and repeat until you do.

7. Define Next Steps

Defining the next steps at the end of an Email Marketing A/B test is critical for several reasons:

1. Clarity and Direction: Providing clear next steps ensures that team members or stakeholders understand what actions should be taken based on the test results. It avoids ambiguity and provides a defined path forward.

2. Decision-Making: Clear next steps guide decision-making processes. They help in determining the outcome of the test and what changes, if any, need to be implemented in the broader marketing strategy.

3. Efficiency: Defined next steps save time and ensure that actions are taken promptly based on the test outcomes. This efficiency can be crucial in implementing changes or optimizations promptly.

4. Accountability: Establishing next steps helps assign responsibilities and hold team members accountable for executing decisions made based on the test results.

5. Continuous Improvement: A clear plan for next steps supports ongoing improvement by ensuring that lessons learned from the A/B test are applied to future campaigns or strategies.

ACTION: Define your next steps. By clearly defining next steps at the end of an Email Marketing A/B test, teams can effectively interpret the results and take actionable measures to optimize future campaigns, enhancing overall marketing strategies.