Even in times dominated by social media and a variety of advanced digital advertising techniques, email marketing continues to be a highly effective method for communicating and conducting business. And while it is hands down one of the best tools around, success does not come overnight. Effective email marketing is comprised of various strategies, and testing is a strategy you can’t afford to do without.

The purpose of testing is to figure out what works before deploying email campaigns to your entire list. It’s about experimenting to find out what your audience wants rather than guessing or just blindly firing away. Considering that it can be the difference between success and failure, it is safe to say that testing is of paramount importance in email marketing.

How Do I Test?

Although it can get pretty complex depending on your approach, testing is a relatively simple process. In fact, you can obtain excellent results by using straightforward A/B testing. What you are doing here is seeing how various campaign elements perform by comparing them against smaller segments of your audience to get a better feel for how your whole list might respond and what works best. When basing your execution off these results, testing can help you get it right the first time instead of having to go back to the drawing board.

A little fine tuning can make all the difference for any given email program. It could be the addition or subtraction of a line of text that makes or breaks your campaign. No matter how strong or valuable your marketing message, being able to predict how it will truly resonate with your audience is nearly impossible. Through testing, you can put different versions of your message in action to better determine its potential impact. Whether your experiments involve dozens or hundreds of subscribers, you should continue to test and retest until you are confident that you have it right.

What Should I Test?

When it comes to testing an email marketing campaign, there are some others can be considered optional, and others that absolutely mandatory. One element that falls in the mandatory category is your subject lines. You should always play around with different subject lines to see which are the most effective at encouraging opens from your subscribers. Other elements in this group include your content, calls to action, and frequency especially. Once you have tested different versions of these elements on small groups, you can either use the best performing versions with your entire list, or create permanent segments based on the results. It’s your call.

There is very little room for error in today’s competitive marketing arena. Consumers are very picky about who they give their time, and if you waste the opportunity, they will tune you out in a heartbeat. By committing to the best practices such as testing, you will be in the position to learn what they really want and deliver.