Reality check. It's extremely difficult to create the perfect cold email campaign on your first try.
People who managed to hit the bullseye that fast are rare. If you know someone with this skillset, let me know so we can become rich like Jeff Bezos. 😂
I'm not one of those people, so it takes a little trial-and-error and testing for me to figure it out. It's after that when I come up with the winning cold email.
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.
In this article, I'm going to show you all split test hacks and tricks I've learned that will help you ramp up your reply rate, boost the number of clicks, and get that open rate to go sky high.
Buckle up as we're about to go hard or go home.
A/B testing is an experiment where you're split testing two or more variations at random, 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:
A/B testing can have a significant impact on your outreach campaigns. It 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:
To make this even more actionable, I'll give you some example cold email stats. We're going to analyze them together.
What problems do you see?
There are two KPIs that are on fire 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.
KPI benchmarks to aim:
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.
Lemme show you the full power of cold email split tests.
Like I said before, before you start playing with open rates, make sure to check your email deliverability status.
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.
So you need to start with:
Once checked, you can move to A/B tests.
That's the first thing people see after receiving your cold email.
In other words, it makes a direct impact on your open rate.
Recommended read: Top 56 subject lines to test
Just click on the A/B test button. Add 2 different subject lines that you feel work better and don't change anything else.
lemlist will automatically split your audience in 2 groups and send emails accordingly.
Ideas to test when it comes to subject lines:
For example, after 5 different A/B tests, I found a subject line that gave me an 86% open rate. 😱
I started with a 55% open rate.
Results:
That's the second thing people see before they open a cold email.
It should be catchy, so people will understand "it's not one more spammy email".
For example, here I played with the annoying "Hi {firstName}". Everyone knows that trick by now. So I got a little bit creative with it.
"Heyo {firstName}! Just joking Ted"
Here are my results after A/B testing it with usual "Hi {firstName}:
PRO TIP: You should think not only about the desktop version of your email but also mobile or even watches.
For example, this is the email that my friend Alex from Competera got. He uses Apple Watches to read emails.
Although it might be a tricky thing to test and sometimes it's a waste of time, there are situations where it's a meaningful factor.
If you spot that your prospects are more likely to read emails at a certain point, due to being busy or having meetings, you can optimize for that.
In order to figure out if time is a factor, A/B testing is a great tool to do it. Try to make 2 different campaigns and send them on different schedules.
There are different cases when you add links to cold emails. You can send links to articles, use cases, forms, calendar availability, and so on...
Since the majority of people try to generate leads with cold emails, I'll show you examples with links to "book a call" tools, such as Calendly.
People always check the link before they click on it. If it looks weird, they won't click on it.
Yes, we marketers did a bad job during the last 15 years, by sending tons of spammy links... 😕
So one of the ideas is to A/B test the way your link looks in the cold email. For example:
After 5 tests of different anchors, the results weren't different significantly. But in all test link with anchor won on +3-5% to the click rate.
I'll show you a tactic that you really need to A/B test. It gave me 2x more leads generated from cold emails.
The trick? Dynamic landing pages.
For example, there are 2 ways to send a Calendly link to your leads:
So, my email looked like this:
And 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 Calendly link to book a demo with me.
And here are the results I got:
The difference was huge! 🔥
Recommended read: How to land sales meetings like
If you want to try dynamic landing pages, use lemlist for free for 14 days and get unrestricted access to all the cool features. 🔥
The reply rate is the key metric for the majority of people who send cold emails.
The response is the beginning of a conversation that can potentially lead to a win-win situation.
This is a strategy that we talk a lot in lemlist family, the largest closed community for salespeople.
It's about writing genuine intro lines and adding custom sentences that change for each prospect.
Vuk, lemlist's Head of Growth, created this mean Tiramisu cold email strategy when he was inviting sales experts to join our webinars.
The results were amazing! No, scratch that, A-M-A-Z-I-N-G!
We had Rand Fishkin, Aaron Ross, Tim Soulo, along many others joining. And btw, Vuk scored a 92% reply rate with this strategy.
With lemlist, you can personalize not only text but also the visual part. For example, you can add personalized images to your cold emails.
lemlist will automatically change text, logos, website screenshots and other elements on the image.
Here is the example of a cold email with personalized images:
Jeff's Zoom-meeting cold email strategy... Jeff was our lemlister of the week:
For instance, you can decide to test a cold email template with text-only content vs. the one with a personalized image.
In my opinion, there is no "wow" effect comparing to the case when your recipients open a cold email and see their own website screenshot. So that's a great idea to A/B test.
You can find the most successful cold email templates here.
You can add personalization based on the info you have with liquid syntax.
For example, have "Hi {{fistName}}" if the location is the USA, and "Bonjour
{{firstName}}" if location is France.
You can also test different call-to-actions based on location.
That's a great thing to A/B test in your cold emails. You can easily personalize small things based on some general info that you have.
If you want to try it out, here is a how-to video by Vuk. 👇
A/B testing is the key to make your cold email perform better.
Don't stop when you find a template that works. Always try to improve and leverage split tests in the process.
I shared with you the ways you can improve your open, click, and reply rates.
If you liked this article, please share it with your friends and colleagues. ❤️
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