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The primary way to start testing your email marketing is to track the results from each email marketing campaign. When you track the results of your email marketing campaigns, it’s the first step to improve your email marketing results time after time. And as marketing is an ongoing process, so is testing.

Determine Your Objective

The ultimate objective for any email campaign is to convert the reader into a sale or customer. While this may or may not be the end-result, there are some objectives you need to meet along the way first. So, if your objective is to increase the open rate of your emails, then testing subject lines can help you determine which subject receives a higher open rate over the other one. If you’re trying to decrease your opt-out rates, then testing the frequency of your email blasts can help you reach this objective. So, before you leap into testing mode, you first have to determine what it is you’re testing. And remember, you can only test one thing at a time.

Segment Your List

There are various ways you can segment your email list. How often you send emails to various groups may directly relate to how engaged the segment is. For example, current customers are likely to be more engaged than a customer that hasn’t purchased from you in a few years. The frequency of emails to current customers, therefore, may be at a higher rate than past customers. Seasonal variances may also apply to frequency (i.e., holiday season for retailers). In order to perform a true frequency test, keep in mind whom the recipients of the email are because this can have a major effect on the results of your frequency test results.

Timing is Everything

There have been numerous studies testing the perfect day of the week and even time of the day emails should be sent. The results of these studies may not be the answer to your business or industry. You need to run these tests for yourself. If you’re marketing to business owners that generally operate in a nine to five business environment then the time of day you send an email blast may vary greatly from a consumer customer that doesn’t get to their personal email until seven o’clock at night. Time zones your customers reside in also come into play. If all of your customers live on the same coast then this may not be an issue, but if you have customers in different time zones, then this is something that needs to be considered when blasting out your latest sales or news announcement.

You’re not going to find the perfect answers for your email campaigns by reading articles and study results. While these sources can provide guidance and give you ideas, you really have to run tests on your own email campaigns to determine what is right for your audience and your business.