What techniques can you use to A/B test email prospecting campaigns?

1 Why A/B test your emails?

A/B testing your emails can help you identify what elements of your email affect your prospects' behavior and decision-making. For example, you can test different subject lines, opening sentences, value propositions, calls to action, signatures, and more. By changing only one variable at a time and sending each version to a random subset of your target audience, you can isolate the impact of that variable on your key metrics, such as open rate, click-through rate, reply rate, and meeting booked rate. A/B testing can help you discover what works best for your prospects and optimize your email campaigns accordingly.

2 How to design your A/B tests?

Before you start A/B testing your emails, you need to have a clear goal and hypothesis for your experiment. Your goal should be aligned with your sales objectives and reflect what you want to achieve with your email campaign, such as generating more replies, booking more meetings, or advancing more prospects to the next stage. Your hypothesis should be a specific and testable statement that predicts how changing one variable will affect your goal. For example, "Using a personalized subject line will increase the reply rate by 10%".

Next, you need to choose the variable you want to test and create two versions of your email, one with the original variable and one with the modified variable. The variable should be relevant to your hypothesis and goal, and it should be easy to measure and compare. For example, if you want to test the subject line, you can create two emails with the same body and signature, but different subject lines. You also need to decide how many prospects you want to include in your test and how you will split them into two groups. Ideally, you should use a large and random sample that represents your target market and avoid any bias or external factors that could affect the results.

5 How to apply your A/B tests?

The final step of A/B testing your emails is to apply what you learned from your experiment to your future email campaigns. You should use the winning version of your email as your new baseline and continue to test and optimize other variables. You should also document and share your findings and best practices with your team and your manager, so that you can improve your collective email prospecting skills and results. A/B testing is an ongoing process that requires constant experimentation and learning, so you should always look for new ways to enhance your email communication and engagement with your prospects.

6 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?