How do you experiment with email design?

1 Define your goals

Before you start experimenting with email design, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve. What are the main objectives of your email campaign? What are the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you will use to evaluate your results? How will you align your email design with your brand identity and your overall digital strategy? Having a clear and specific goal will help you focus your experiments and avoid wasting time and resources.

2 Choose your variables

Once you have your goal, you need to decide what aspects of your email design you want to test. These are called variables, and they can be anything from the subject line, the sender name, the layout, the images, the copy, the call to action, the colors, the fonts, and more. You can test one variable at a time (A/B testing) or multiple variables at once (multivariate testing). The advantage of A/B testing is that it's simpler and easier to interpret, while the advantage of multivariate testing is that it can reveal more complex interactions and effects.

3 Segment your audience

To run effective experiments, you need to have a well-defined and relevant audience. You can segment your audience based on various criteria, such as demographics, behavior, preferences, interests, location, and more. Segmentation allows you to tailor your email design to different groups of customers and test how they respond to different variations. You can also use segmentation to control for external factors that might affect your results, such as seasonality, time of day, device type, and more.

4 Set up your tools

To experiment with email design, you need to have the right tools to create, send, and track your emails. There are many email marketing platforms and software that can help you with this, such as Mailchimp, Constant Contact, AWeber, and more. These tools allow you to design your emails using templates, drag-and-drop editors, or custom HTML. They also allow you to send your emails to different segments of your audience and monitor their performance using metrics such as open rate, click-through rate, conversion rate, bounce rate, and more.

5 Run your experiments

Once you have your tools ready, you can start running your experiments. Depending on the type and size of your experiment, you can run it for a few hours, days, or weeks. You can also run multiple experiments at the same time or sequentially. The important thing is to follow the scientific method and use a control group and a test group for each variable. The control group receives the original version of your email design, while the test group receives the modified version. This way, you can compare the results and see if there is a significant difference between the two groups.

6 Analyze your results

The final step of experimenting with email design is to analyze your results and draw conclusions. You need to look at the data and see if your hypothesis was confirmed or rejected. You also need to look at the statistical significance and confidence level of your results, which indicate how reliable and accurate they are. You can use tools such as Google Analytics, Excel, or online calculators to perform these calculations. Based on your analysis, you can decide whether to keep, modify, or discard your email design changes.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?