Split testing, or A/B testing, can provide valuable feedback about your online marketing efforts. Here’s a summary for those of you who aren’t familiar with the term.

Say you have an email list of 100 subscribers, and you want to know if including the recipient’s name in the subject line will help your open rate. You randomly select 50 of your recipients to receive the default subject line, and the other 50 to receive the test subject line.
Default subject: “Learn how to maintain your widget”
Test subject: “[first name], learn how to maintain your widget”
The rest of the email stays exactly the same between the two versions.

Send out the email blast, and track the response you get.

This allows you to very specifically test an individual element of your campaign. By isolating the change to only one variable, you can track with relative accuracy the difference that variable makes. If you changed more than one element in the test email, this would muddy the waters.

Note that in order to be valid, a split test must have two elements in place:

1. The field being measured must be sufficiently large
2. There must be an appreciable difference between the results of the default vs. the test

This is, at root, the same principle as the scientific method: state a hypothesis, run an experiment, and measure the results. And you don’t even need a degree! Don’t you feel smart now?

You can use the split testing method on more than just email campaigns. Banner ads, landing pages, and even your entire Web site can benefit from testing.

(By the way, in case you’re wondering, it turns out that personalizing email subject lines does increase the open rate, but it increases the click-through rate (CTR) even more!) http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=32157#