What if you could make a slight change to one of your e-mails and get a 20 percent lift in opens or a 10 percent increase in sales leads? As a marketing professional you’d make the chance in an instant. But making changes to your e-mail campaigns to produce better results is never that easy. There are simply so many different variables it is often hard to determine what element to change?

That’s where testing becomes so important. By testing on an on-going basis you can find out what factors influence the success of your e-mail campaigns. But it is also important to ensure you test in an effective manner. Follow these five steps to create an effective, measurable testing structure.

Step #1: Decide What to Test

Because testing is relative easy, it’s often tempting to test multiple elements all at the same time. This would be a huge mistake. You should start by testing just one element. If you test more than one element in the same e-mail, it is challenging (insert impossible) to determine what single change actually influenced the changes in results. Here are four easy and straightforward tests you can start with:

Subject Lines: Create two different Subject Lines for the same e-mail. For example, lets say an accounting firm has just added a new business unit that does Cost Segregation work. Here are the subject lines you could test.

• Subject line #1: New! Cost Segregation Unit Added
• Subject line #2: We Now Can Handle Your Cost Segregation Needs

Long vs. Short Copy: Try to determine if less really more for your target audience? Create a shorter version of your current newsletter with teasers and links to your website. Or create two versions of a the same e-mail. Keep one short and to the point and make the other a little longer by adding additional, but useful information.

Special offers/incentives: Create two different offers. For example, an online bookseller might want to ramp up sales towards the end of a quarter. The firms should send the following two offers to see which one gets a better response.

• Offer #1: Buy 3 books and get 1 free
• Offer #2: Buy 3 books and get free shipping

Other easy tests along the same lines could include the time of day or day of the week you launch a campaign, HTML vs. text-based, types of calls-to-action, the placement of a call-to-action button or link, and the From address.

Step #2: Decide What Means Success

Testing is great, but you need to determine what increases will be measured to determine success. Possibilities could include increased Website traffic, higher response rates to an offer, direct sales, opens, and click-through rates. The easiest place to start is with your campaigns opens and clickthroughs. But you may also find that one campaign you test has a lower open or clickthrough rate then the second version, but generated far more direct sales. So again, it is important you define success before you launch.

Step #3: Determine How to Divide Your List

When it comes to who you will send your test to, you have two basic options. You can either split your entire list in half and test one against the other (A/B Test) or take a small random sample and do a pre-test.

A pre-test is an excellent way to find out what works before sending the e-mail to your entire list. In a perfect world this is the preferred method. Cause you can take the knowledge from the smaller test list and then improve your overall response rate to a much larger list. Plus, it also protects you from sending a poor performing e-mail test to a large portion of your list-and wasting your efforts and their time. To pre-test, choose a random sampling of 100 people from your master list, then split that in half and send each half one of the two test campaigns.

Step #4: Test, Measure, and Declare a Winner

Once you have everything ready, launch your test campaign. The great thing about e-mail is that you get your results quickly—usually within a 24 to 48 hour period. Determine the “winner” based on how you have decided to determine “success” and launch the best performing e-mail to your entire list and what the results roll in.

Conclusion

Testing takes more effort, but also increases you chance for success. And most important of all, it lets your customers, clients tell you, through their actions, what they respond to best. This method is an excellent and trustworthy way to improve your e-mails. Test often. You might be surprised just about every time!