The best marketing team are well known for fine-tuning their emails a lot. Their emails looks perfect when you receive one of them. But what you might not know, it’s that they literally have tested every single word in the email. Show A/B testing is the process of trying different combinations of an email to determine and pick the one that performs the best - for examples the one that gives the best metrics (opens, clicks, replies, etc.) Unfortunately, Gmail doesn’t provide a tool out of the box to send an A/B tests with their platform. But thanks to Google Sheets and a Gmail mail merge solution, you can easily start an A/B tests using your Gmail account. Let’s see how to do it. Let’s prepare your AB testTo send your first A/B tests from a Gmail or Google Workspace (formerly G Suite), you need to start from… a Google Sheets. As I said in the introduction, Gmail doesn’t provide any marketing tools. But a myriad of third-party mail merge tools, such as Mailmeteor, have filled the gap to power up your Gmail account. Here are the steps to follow:
Your spreadsheet is almost ready! That was quick ;) What do you want to A/B test?Now, it totally depends on the A/B test you want to perform. Sometimes you might want to try out a different subject, sometimes tweak a sentence, sometimes a whole paragraph or the entire email. To have a great A/B test, I recommend you to restrict your test to the minimum. A/B tests are more effective if you change a (very) small part of your email. For example the subject or a sentence. If you A/B test more than that, it generally means that your test is too large and you won’t learn much from it. Pro tip: Some ninja marketers run A/B tests with only one (1) word of difference between the two emails sent. It requires a sample that is large enough and enough time to test. For this tutorial, let’s see how to run an A/B test on the subject line. Then we will see how to run an A/B test on a sentence. How to A/B test the email’s subject?Testing the email’s subject is probably the most common A/B tests in email marketing. The email’s subject is the first part of your email that recipients will interact with. And you get only one chance to make a first good impression. To fine tune the subject of your emails, follow these steps:
Using this simple technique you can try out different subjects and see which one performs the better. If you have a Mailmeteor Premium account, and you have enable the tracking, Mailmeteor will show you which group has the best open-rate and click-rate. Making it really easy to decide which subject you should use. How to A/B test your email’s body?Like I said earlier, it’s a best practice to A/B test only a small part of your e-mail. In the following, we will run a test by changing one sentence of a paragraph. While you can apply the same principles exposed here to change multiple sentences or even send totally different emails to each of your recipient, it’s best to test very small changes. Otherwise you won’t know precisely what makes one version better than the other. To fine tune a part of your email’s body, follow these steps:
Of course, you combine multiples merge fields (aka variables) in the same email. For example, you could use the recipient’s first name (if you have it). You could also use the same technique to run an A/B test on multiple parts of your email. But that’s not something I would recommend as it’s a best practice to narrow your test to the minimum as I‘ve explained earlier. Test your AB significanceWhen your AB test is completed, it’s now time to validate your results by calcultating its significance. The significance will let you know if the copy change impacted your results positively and by how much. In this example, we sent 2000 emails in total, split into 2 groups of 1000 recipients. In the first group A, 90 recipients engaged with our email by clicking one of its link, that’s a 9% conversion rate. In the second group B, there were 120 clicks, that’s a 12% conversion rate. Now it’s not enough to say that 12% is better than 9%. It actually depends on your AB test group sizes. Calculating the significance tells us that indeed the test B converted 34% better, which is statistically significant. In others words, you should definitely go for the test B copy! There are various AB test calculators out there. We can recommend the free and open source AB test significance calculator made my Matt Mazur or the simpler AB test calculator from Neil Patel. Let’s wrap it upIn this tutorial, you have learned how to A/B test your emailing campaign using your Gmail account. You’ve seen that it’s really easy to do so, using both Google Sheets and a mail merge solution such as Mailmeteor. Two more words on Mailmeteor: You can send up to 50 emails per day, using the free version of Mailmeteor, which lets you run an A/B test on two groups of ~40 people in each. Plenty enough for a simple test. If you need to run your test on more recipients, grab a premium account to send up to 2000 emails/day (one test per day with two groups of 1000 recipients each). Mailmeteor Premium also comes with tracking feature to easily compute metrics from your campaigns, such as the open rate or click rate of each group. And you’re not limited to test email with plain text. Mailmeteor supports HTML email, which make it the tool of choice for all email marketers. This guide was written by Corentin Brossault, Mailmeteor's co-founder. Mailmeteor is a simple & privacy-focused emailing software. Trusted by millions of users worldwide, it is often considered as the best Gmail mail merge to send mass personalized emails. Give us a try and let us know what you think! Where can I create a test email?Where can you create dummy emails?. MailSlurp. MailSlurp is the leading email address generator. ... . Mailinator. Mailinator is one of the most popular random email address generators you can find. ... . Guerilla Mail. ... . Maildrop. ... . Tempmail. ... . Creating a fake email with your Gmail. ... . Use Cypress JS to test with email. ... . Playwright email testing.. What is the +1 email trick?An underutilized Gmail trick can be the perfect solution to this problem. If you add “+1” (or any numbers/letters) to the end of your Gmail handle, Gmail recognizes it as belonging to your email address but it looks like a unique email address to the site for which you are registering an account.
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