Optimize Your Email Performance With A/B Testing

Improving Your Marketing Emails

We know that A/B testing is the cornerstone of a data-driven marketing strategy, and email is an especially powerful channel to test and optimize. That’s why we’re excited to announce that our intuitive A/B testing tool now supports email, so you can quickly optimize your messaging and increase conversions.

What Are the Benefits of A/B Testing on Email Performance?

As companies face growing expectations to execute flawless omnichannel communications and serve users a seamless and sticky user experience, email is a channel that mobile apps need now more than ever. With that comes a high expectation for relevant, entertaining, and engaging email content. So how are you to deliver on this expectation within your email communication strategy?

Answer: A/B testing different components of your marketing emails ahead of time to gauge customer preference and message performance before you send your campaigns to the majority of your audience.

Customer Customization

Experimentation is the gold standard for identifying what does and does not work for your customers. With A/B tests for email, you can rapidly test everything from subject lines to imagery and content length to identify what resonates most with your customers. This enables you to move forward with confidence, not questions.

Save Time with Our Intuitive Builder

Create an email A/B test in minutes with our intuitive builder. You can set your audience, create up to 10 email variants, and schedule your test all on the same page.

Drive Conversions and Revenue

Email marketing is a powerful channel for assisting conversions. You can use email A/B tests to determine what content, imagery, layout, and CTAs drive the most purchases in your abandoned cart campaigns.

You can also use Email A/B tests to evaluate landing page performance. Keep all elements of the email variants the same and switch the call-to-action link to determine where you should be driving customers to maximize revenue.

Boost Customer Engagement and Retention

To re-engage a user, use Email A/B tests to optimize subject lines, content, and design. This test will help you identify what motivates your customers to open an email and return to your platform or product, boosting your engagement and longer-term retention.

Increase Web Traffic

Leverage Email A/B tests to improve page views. test various promotions, offers, CTAs, content types, layouts, and designs to determine what tactics generate the most clickthroughs.

Improve Onboarding and Activation

A great onboarding experience is a strong defense against customer churn. Try A/B testing your welcome emails to determine what helps activate your new customers and keep them engaged.

OneSignal Enriches Your A/B Strategy

Level up your strategy with Advanced A/B Testing, which empowers you to test up to 10 variants in a fraction of the time. Try testing multiple variations of the same element (A/B/n testing), or test multiple variables at the same time (multivariate testing).

Testing Options

If you’re ready to optimize your email performance, there are lots of elements to test; for instance, try testing:

• Subject lines to optimize open rates
• Email layouts (e.g., Image vs. image with text vs. image and text) to increase click rates
• Different CTA types (e.g., “Start Trial” vs “Claim My Free Trial”) to improve click rates
• Email copy lengths to increase click rates
• Offers/promotions to raise click rates
• Landing pages to boost down funnel conversions

OneSignal Email Delivery and Statistics

As a reminder, our email reports offer the following vital information you'll want to reference in the process of evaluating the efficacy of your email campaigns.

Delivery

We offer visibility into high-level delivery stats such as how the message was created, when it started sending, how long it took to fully send and any throttling limits in place.

Engagement Statistics

In addition to delivery stats, we provide fundamental engagement statistics including open and click-through rates.

Open Rate: The rate of unique recipients who opened or viewed the contents of your email. Open rates may fall if you send emails at too high of a frequency, for instance.

Click-Through Rate (CTR): The rate of unique recipients to who an email was delivered to and who clicked any link within the email itself. CTRs can indicate how well your content is engaging your audience and how motivated they are to take the next action in the buyer's journey.

How to Create an A/B Test With OneSignal

First, select your editing experience — you can choose between our painless drag & drop editor, our custom HTML editor, or one of our pre-built templates.

Next, add your variants. You may add up to 10 variations of your email, as well as save your current test as its own custom template for future experimenting.

Finally, it's time to set your A/B audience settings. This is where you will set the percentage of your audience to randomly receive one of your variants. Variants are sent out randomly to the audience percentage you choose, but they are also sent equally.

So, if you set your test audience to 25%, 12.5% will receive variant A and the other 12.5% will receive variant B. If you keep your test audience at 25% with three variants, 8.3% would receive variant A, 8.3% would receive variant B, and 8.3% would receive variant C. And so on!

After some time has passed, you'll be ready to select a winner based on the engagement data you've collected.

Ready to Create an Email A/B Test?

Visit our email tutorial documentation to get started. Email A/B testing is now available for all plans. Our Free and Growth plans have access to regular A/B variant testing. To unlock up to 10 variants with Advanced A/B testing, upgrade your plan today. We also cover best practices for A/B testing in our blog and webinar that apply to email.