10.3 - "The Beggar Squeeze"
šŸ„ŗ

10.3 - "The Beggar Squeeze"

ā€£
Here's what it is:
image

This is essentially A/B or split testing on steroids.

A/B test or split test is basically coming up with 2 subject lines for an email message -- one is the original and the other is the variation.

You test each one against the other and see which has a higher open rate. Then you send the winner to the rest of the recipients.

--

E.g.

Original -- send to 30% of random recipients

Variation -- send to another random 30%

Wait for a few hours or a day

Then send Winner to rest of recipients (40%)

--

The key here is the splitting of the recipients must be done RANDOMLY. Thatā€™s the whole purpose of a test. You canā€™t cherry pick the segment to be used for the original, for example, as that wouldnā€™t be a fair test.

Some time ago, I doubled my open rate just by doing an A/B test.

Hereā€™s my Original subject line:

Dec Updates ā€“ including Split Test feature

And hereā€™s the result:

image

Hereā€™s my Variation subject line that I tested:

New feature ā€“ Split Test for maximum results

And hereā€™s the result:

image

Just by changing the words around (takes 10 seconds max), I got twice as many people opening my emails.

57 opens VS 285 opens.

Itā€™s actually 5X even though I only got double the open rate! How come? Iā€™ll tell you more in just a bit.

If this was sent to a larger audience, the difference would be bigger.

Imagine if you were sending a ā€œlast day special offerā€ email.

If youā€™re not doing any split testingā€¦ you could have, say, 3000 people opening and reading your email.

If youā€™re doing split testing (takes 10 seconds), you could have as much as 6000 people reading your email instead.

Youā€™d get much more sales!

How to implement this

Go to your email marketing tool and activate the A/B or split test feature. If you donā€™t know how, check their docs.

I use BirdSend, so Iā€™m going to show you how I did it in BirdSend:

image

Then activate the ā€œAutomatic Winnerā€ feature:

image

By doing this you donā€™t ā€œwasteā€ traffic. In this example, youā€™re sending your higher performing email to 70% (30% + 40%) of the traffic.

Remember the 57 opens VS 285 opens above?

Itā€™s actually 5X even though you only got double the open rate!

This is because when a winner is found (the one with double the email open rate), itā€™s sent to the rest of the email recipients (40%).

So this batch of 40% receives the better performing subject lineā€¦ further boosting the performance of your email.

Hence even though itā€™s double the open rateā€¦ the actual number of opens more than just doubled. In this case, itā€™s 5X!

Use ā€œsteroidsā€ to further maximize your results

Resend the winning email to recipients who didnā€™t open the email with the losing subject line.

Let that sink in for a second.

Resend winning email to recipients who didnā€™t open the email with the losing subject line.

Result = even more people opening your emails.

However, implementing this is not easy. You might not even be able to because at the time of this writing, AFAIK the only email tool that can do this is -- ehm ehm BirdSend.

(if you find another tool that can do this, please let me know)

In BirdSend, again, I just tick a checkbox to activate this feature:

image

This is what I call ā€œthe beggar squeezeā€. Itā€™s like weā€™re a beggar and even a teeny-weeny drop of water is valuable to us. And BirdSend lets you do thatā€¦ squeezing every ounce of juice from your hard work and sweat.

šŸ’”
Let systems do the hard work for you, so you can focus on growing your business. Your job is simply to come up with a variation subject line and plug it into the email tool (again, takes 10 seconds)ā€¦ for maximum conversions.

You shouldnā€™t be the one having to ā€œanalyzeā€ whether the control or variation is better or even do stupid (and time-consuming) things likeā€¦

  • Split your recipients into 3 groups manually
  • Then create a broadcast to send control to group #1
  • Then create a second broadcast to send variation to group #2
  • Wait for a few hours/days, then come back into your account and MANUALLY check which one is performing better
  • Create another broadcast to send the winner to group #3

OMG!!! šŸ˜±šŸ¤Æ

Seriously, Iā€™ve seen help docs from email tools (that claim they support split testing) that ask you to do the above.

And even if youā€™re patient enough to do the above stepsā€¦ how do you split the recipients into 3 groups RANDOMLY ā€” which is the whole basis of a test? You canā€™t because your subscribers are basically grouped either by tags or lists.

If you send the Control to those tagged with X and the Variation to those tagged with Y ā€” thatā€™s not really testing as thereā€™s no randomness.

Next time you send an email to your subscribers, make sure to spend 10 seconds to come up with another subject line and run a split test on steroids.

If your email tool doesnā€™t let you do this quickly in 1 or 2 clicks, youā€™re wasting precious time and energy. In BirdSend, you can easily do this in 1 click.

Donā€™t believe it?