Should you run an A/B test or build an email campaign?
June 2019
A series of A/B/n experiments to optimize the real estate, copy, and design on your highest-traffic landing page? Or a new lead magnet and nurture sequence?
Hopefully youâre not making decisions like this on a daily basis. In the long term, though, these questions are crucial.
A mature organization will have a CMO setting budgets, missions, targets - so the CRO person will run an A/B test and the email person will build a campaign. Get back to work. But what about with younger brands and smaller teams?
Sometimes you do neither
The two options are independent of one another.
You should not run an A/B test if:
- You donât have the traffic/conversions to reach a conclusion
- Youâre not prepared to act on the data you collect
- Thereâs something more valuable you could do with that time and effort, and you know it
- You donât do A/B testing - because your team has tried it and determined that for now, the ROI is not there
You should not build a new email campaign if:
- You have no evidence to support the investment of time and energy
- After experimentation and measurement, youâve decided that a simple, weekly update is the sweet spot for your list
- You donât send emails - because your team has tried it and determined that for now, the ROI is not there
Sometimes you do one or the other, or both
Youâve got the skill, and the will, to run a test? And maybe itâs kind of your job? If thereâs no compelling reason not to, go for it. (Same applies to building the email campaign.)
Not to mention the opportunities to A/B test your email campaign, or run an experiment on traffic from the email channel.
But what about your first test, or putting together a campaign to send to a list thatâs gone cold? Creating, or resurrecting, an entire arm of your marketing program? This is best done as an experiment.
Sometimes you try one out
If youâre not currently doing email marketing, but you have the resources to test it out, keep it lean. In a monthâs time, you can create a 5-email educational sequence that your prospective customers should find interesting. You can put up a landing page, and drive some traffic to the page. Once subscribers get through the sequence, you can send them a special offer.
How many visitors sign up? How many open the emails? How many clicked through to the offer? How many purchases did you get?
And of course, how much did all this cost you?
This is a tiny amount of data, but it should be enough to decide if itâs worth continuing your efforts. (How many more customers are out there?)
While youâre experimenting with email marketing, youâre all in, and the answer to âShould you build an email campaign?â is âYeah, duh - unless we come up with a better approach.â
But if youâre not mid-experiment, and itâs not an activity youâve prioritized based on measuring its performance, youâre officially off the hook. The answer is ânot now.â
What are you experimenting with this month?