Some time ago, I doubled my email open rate with only 10 seconds of extra work.
In this post, I’m sharing what I did, how I did it, and how you too can do it.
Because we have finite resources available… I like to ask the question:
“What is the easiest/fastest thing I can do in my business right now that can have the biggest impact?”
In other words, what is the greatest leverage I can possibly have in my current business state?
Since the very beginning of my online business journey up till now… I’ve always been relying heavily on email marketing to generate sales.
If you’re into email marketing like I am, you should already be familiar with Split Testing or A/B Testing. It’s one of the greatest leverage you can have in email marketing.
What I Did To Double Email Open Rates
In this post, we’ll focus on Split Testing the subject line since it’s one of the first things people look at before deciding if they want to open an email.
I’m not going to cover how to create compelling subject lines again, since I’ve already done that.
So you come up with 2 subject lines for your Split Test (A/B test) — one is the Original and the other one is the Variation.
It’s pretty easy to set up a Split Test, though it depends on the tool/system you’re using. But I’d say it should be pretty straightforward even for the most challenging tool.
If your current email tool really really makes it difficult for you to set it up, switch to an easy tool. Obviously I’m biased with BirdSend as me and my team created it — but seriously it’s so easy and quick to set up a split test (or anything else), inside BirdSend.
Here’s my Original subject line:
Dec Updates – including Split Test feature
And here’s the result:
.
Here’s my Variation subject line that I tested:
New feature – Split Test for maximum results
And here’s the result:
As you can see, just by changing the words around (takes 10 seconds max), I got twice as many people opening my emails.
57 opens VS 285 opens.
It’s actually 5X even though you only got double the open rate! How come? I’ll tell you more later down in the post.
If this was sent to a larger audience, the difference would be bigger.
Imagine if you were sending a “last day special offer” email.
If you’re not doing any Split Testing… you could have, say, 3000 people opening and reading your email.
If you’re doing Split Testing (takes 10 seconds), you could have as much as 6000 people reading your email instead.
You’d get much more sales!
How I Did It
Inside BirdSend, I just do this:
Then we have another feature called “The Automatic Winner” (which is optional but highly recommended):
Basically what this does is split your recipients into 3 segments:
1/ Control
2/ Variation
3/ Winner
You send the control to a portion of your recipients (say 30%).
Then you send the variation to another portion (say 30%).
After that you wait for a few hours/days and watch how the control perform against the variation. Which one has more opens/clicks/sales?
After a few hours/days has passed and a winner is known (either opens/clicks/sales), the tool then automatically sends the winning email to the rest of the recipients (in this case 40%).
This allows you not to “waste” traffic. In the example above, you’re sending 70% (30% + 40%) of the traffic with your higher performing email message.
Remember the 57 opens VS 285 opens above?
It’s actually 5X even though you only got double the open rate!
This is because when a winner is found (the one with double the email open rate), it is sent to the rest of the email recipients (40%).
So this batch of 40% receives the better performing subject line… further boosting the performance of your email message.
Hence in reality, even though it’s double the open rate… the actual number of opens MORE than just doubled. In this case, it’s 5X!
That’s called maximizing every ounce of your juice. Again… as small business owners, we have a finite amount of resources. Hence we should always maximize our juice.
Where most email marketing tools stop
Most email tools stop at the “automatic winner” feature… even though there are also tools that don’t even have this feature.
With BirdSend, we go a step further.
We’re always thinking of how we can really really maximize every ounce of your juice… to “squeeze” every single drop.
Which is why we’re the only email marketing tool to come up with this “profit-boosting” feature…
With just a click of your mouse (takes 0.5 second), you can even resend the winning email to recipients who didn’t open the email with the losing subject line.
Let that sink in for a second.
Resend winning email to recipients who didn’t open the email with the losing subject line.
In BirdSend, again I just tick a checkbox to activate this feature:
This is what I call “the beggar squeeze”. It’s like we’re a beggar and even a teeny-weeny drop of water is valuable to us. And BirdSend let’s you do that… squeezing every ounce of juice from your hard work and sweat.
How You Can Apply It To Your Business
Let systems do the hard work for you, so that you can focus more on growing your business.
Your job is simply to come up with a variation subject line and plug it into the email tool (again, takes 10 seconds)… for maximum conversions.
That’s all.
You shouldn’t be the one having to “analyze” whether the control or variation is better or even do stupid (and time-consuming) things like…
- Split your recipients into 3 groups manually
- Then create a broadcast to send control to group #1
- Then create a second broadcast to send variation to group #2
- Wait for a few hours/days, then come back into your account and MANUALLY check which one is performing better
- Create another broadcast to send the winner to group #3
OMG!!!
Seriously, I’ve seen help docs from email tools (that claim they support split testing) that ask you to do the above.
And even if you’re patient enough to do the above steps… how do you split the recipients into 3 groups RANDOMLY — which is the whole basis of a test? You can’t because your subscribers are basically grouped either by tags or lists.
If you send the Control to to those tagged with X and the Variation to those tagged with Y — that’s not really testing as there’s no randomness.Next time you send an email to your subscribers, make sure to spend 10 seconds to come up with another subject line and run a split test. It costs almost nothing… yet has the potential to double or triple your results.
And if you’re looking for a 1-click (10-second) setup to run your Split Test (A/B Test), BirdSend is the KING in terms of ease and time of setup. No other email marketing tool comes close.
But don’t just take my word for it.
Experience it yourself and prove me wrong.