3 Email Best Practices you should rethink(I): A/B Testing

Today we offer you Dela Quist's ideas on some frequently used strategies in email marketing and we take the opportunity to clarify what we said in the previous article on deliverabilityd. The CEO of Alchemy Worxone of the UK's leading email marketing agencies, answers some common industry assertions and provides some very interesting insights in the webinar. "Approach with caution: 3 email best practices to think twice about".

Do A/B testing before sending anything
According to Dela Quist, A/B testing as it is commonly used is a waste of time, unless you take into consideration the time needed to obtain results with perspective, which is never less than a week.
Any test that is carried out before one week after the end of shipment will be optimising openings, but not salesWe can only see real conversion results one week after sending.
The winning A/B Testing option for open rate may not be the best for CTR and it definitely does not mean it is the best for conversion. To optimise our tests we must be clear about what we want to optimise: openings, clicks or conversion. It is common that campaigns with fewer openings generate a higher percentage of sales or conversion.
It is more efficient to create a methodology on how to generate an issue, structure or design than to test each of them independently and constantly "reinvent the wheel".
Quist gives as an example the following situation: The highest number of opens happens in the first 36 hours of a mailing. However, those who open the email later buy more than those who open it immediately. Therefore, an A/B test can give us an idea of which subject/design/structure/copy works best and we will be optimising open rates or reactivity to the email, but if we take into account that the users who are more likely to make a purchase are those who open the email later, we will realise that we are not optimising sales.
In this graph the yellow and green colours show opens and clicks over time, and the blue and violet lines show conversion.

Do you agree with Quist?  In the next article we will continue to discuss the issues he addresses in his webinar, in particular the obsession with optimising the open rate while ignoring the real numbers.