The end of the year approaches and for many email marketers those are exciting days. And then they get the temptation to hurry to get all of the email campaigns on the way. That’s when they commit several major sins to the rules of good email marketing practices.
Testing your email campaign testing is definitely a must these days. We like to put another five potential pitfalls in a list so you do not fall into them during these busy days.
Time
It may sound like a truism, but the time that you test an email test should be the same time that you intend to launch your email campaign. Otherwise you get a distorted picture. The only exception: if you want to pick the right time for sending.
Deciding to quickly
Time pressure gives us the bad habit of being content with less. This is also a potential danger. If you already draw conclusions from an AB test barely left an hour ago, you work with incomplete information. You must leave at least one day for your email test. After 24 hours you can make fully informed decisions. Although 48 to 72 hours are sometimes even better to indicate the winner.
Not relevant
A good test also requires a statistically significant sample. Just taking the first hundred from your list, doesn’t meet this requirement. The chance that you get a wrong impression and thus draw a wrong conclusion is quite large. Provide a large sample, but definitely make sure that they are randomly picked from the list.
Hidden consequences
Rushing into things also means that sometimes a first good result leads you to jumping to hasty conclusions. Maybe your beautiful Christmas promotion suddenly gets high click-through rates. And for that reason you think you know the winner of your test. But maybe you overlooked the fact that this email also scores high in the unsubscribe rates!
External factors
Are there external factors that can affect the results of your test? Are you simultaneously running a classic postal campaign? Has the product in email A just been featured in the news? These are examples that can pollute your statistics. And with all the issues of the day, you can easily lose sight of those.
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