A lot of people ask me, what’s the best day to post or what’s the best time to post or what sort of subject line should I use for my emails… My answer is always the same – test it!
Whenever I put together a strategy deck, I always include a slide on testing. Whether it’s your social media strategy or your email marketing strategy, testing in my opinion is very important. Why? Because it allows you to learn more about your audience and understand what works and what doesn’t. It also means that you can improve your content and generate the performance/engagement you are hoping for.
Now let’s look at how testing works.
The best way to go about testing when it comes to emails is splitting your data in half and then sending out a variant to half of your database and the other variant to the other half of your database. This is also known as Split Testing.
A lot of email service providers (ESPs) will have an inbuilt function to split test, so you don’t have to manually split out your data, however there might be some times where you do have to. So check before hand in your platform.
With social media posts, you obviously can’t split the date but what you would do is post variant A and B and then compare results.
While that’s great, what exactly can we test?
When it comes to emails, you can test subject lines, personalisation, frequency of sends, imagery, language, etc.
With social media, you can look at testing imagery, language, number of hashtags, frequency of posts, topics, etc.
Here’s what you need to remember when it comes to testing:
1) Always only test 1 thing at a time. If you’re testing layouts in an email, then only test layout. Don’t test layout and the colour of the call to action as this would not give you a clear answer as to why one email is performing better than the other. You wouldn’t be able to tell if it’s because of the layout of the colour.
2) Run a test over a period of time. So, if you’re testing subject lines, then test it over 3 or 4 email so that you have enough data to prove that one variant is better than the other. Or if you want to test number of hashtags on a post, same thing… test it over a period of time.
Any other queries on testing, then feel free to reach out to me!
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