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Cold Emailing
Cold email A/B testing: Get more opens, clicks & replies with split tests
lemlist team
June 9, 2023
August 13, 2020
|
7 min. read
lemlist team
LAST UPDATED
June 9, 2024
READING TIME
7 min.
It's quite difficult to create the perfect cold email campaign on your first try.
There are no silver bullets, but there's A/B testing.
Cold email A/B testing is the ultimate way to quickly identify what works and what doesn't work in your outreach campaigns.
What is A/B testing?
A/B testing is an experiment where you're split-testing two or more variations randomly, to figure out which variation brings better results.
In the world of cold emails, you can A/B test subject lines, two emails, different personalized images, or the entire sequences if you decide so.
How do you perform an A/B test with cold emails?
There are three important rules to live by:
Test one thing at a time: e.g. test subject lines only, not both that and image vs. text
Measure: always analyze all three cold email metrics (open, click, and reply rates) to get a clear picture of what variation is working better
Have a big enough audience: to gain relevant insights, make sure your email list contains a minimum of 100-200 prospects.
What should you A/B test in your cold emails?
A/B testing helps you accomplish goals faster in the short-term, as long as you know how to analyze your current cold email performance and identify existing problems.
Let's imagine a situation where you are trying to book meetings using cold emails.
To assess the current state of your outreach campaigns, we need to analyze the following:
Are people receiving and seeing your emails? Before analyzing any metric, make sure your email deliverability is clean
Are people opening your emails? Analyze your open rate
How many replies did you get? Analyze your reply rate and the type of replies you got
To make this even more actionable, let’s analyze some example cold email stats.
What problems do you see?
Two KPIs are standing out here, and not in a good way.
People are not opening these emails. Plus, there are almost no replies.
Considering that the click rate is zero, let's assume there are no links in the cold email, and the sender's sole goal is to get more replies and book meetings.
Goal KPI benchmarks:
Open rate → 50%+
Click rate → 40%+
Reply rate → 8%+
In our example, we know where our problems lie.
Assuming that audience targeting is on point, people are not opening our emails and they're definitely not replying.
We need to fix that. Precisely where A/B testing can help.
When your open rate is lower than 50%, it might mean that people are not seeing your emails to begin with, so A/B testing subject lines would be a waste of time.
For example, there are 2 ways to send a lemcal link to your leads:
Include it in the email:
Add a dynamic landing page with a custom video + embedded lemcal on it:
So, my email looked like this:
When people click on the video, they go to a dedicated landing page, where they will see a few more personalized touchpoints, along with the lemcal link to book a demo with me.
You need your perfect leads, but you want to plan your monthly budget. We get it. Here's a full breakdown to understand how much leads cost when you're using lemlist.
Find out what an IMAP server is, how they synchronize your emails across multiple devices, and why they play a vital role in modern email communication.
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