JML Direct

A/B testing - small changes can lead to huge results

One of the easiest and quickest ways of boosting email marketing performance is to run A/B split tests to determine the best performing versions of your email campaigns.

Small changes to your email can make a surprisingly large impact on your results. Marketers who test their emails generally stick to basics such as subject lines, the day of the week or from name.

These are fairly obvious things to test and will make a huge difference. But what about minor changes to copy and layout? Do these make any significant difference?

The evidence suggests that they can. Lets take the case of JML Direct. They ran an email campaign promoting their 'Fresh Air Globe'™ product. The two splits they tested are shown below. Can you spot the difference?

The change made was to remove the top navigation bar which takes users to specific product categories of the JML website. From a first glance at the reports the email with the navigation bar had a higher click-thru rate. Had this been what JML measured the success on this would have been the creative used. However JML were also using the ROI tracking function in Maxemail. This provides the ability to track online orders from a specific email campaign. The email without the navigation bar generated twice the number of purchases.

The theory behind this is that recipients clicking on the navigation bar in the first email were drifting around the website rather than being directed through the specific landing pages on the product being promoted.

Looking at where the click-thru's occurred in the email further backs this up. The vast majority of clicks were on the navigation bar and if you actually deducted these from the click-thru total the click-thru rate would actually be less than the email without the navigation header.

The moral of this story is not that navigation bars at the top of the email are a bad thing but that these seemingly insignificant changes can have a huge impact on the level of success in your email marketing campaign.