All your life you’ve been told to trust your intuition, but when it comes to A/B testing it’s just plain dangerous. If you’re lucky it may lead you to testing the right variables for your email marketing campaign or it could trick you into thinking you’re making progress, when in reality you’re just spinning your wheels.

It’s extremely common for businesses to decide on A/B testing variables using what they think is working or not working. This, of course, comes with a lot of bias depending on the person responsible with the decision.

At Customer Think, they believe you should use data and facts to guide your decision:

“When you first decide to start A/B testing a web page, which elements do you test? Some say the copy, others push for the CTA button. Instead of basing this critical decision on intuition, you should take the data-driven approach to A/B testing and base it on facts to determine which elements to test, why they are important, and how the various potential results can impact page performance.”

Basing your A/B testing off facts first will help you to make a hierarchy of variables. Next, you should always isolate a single variable in your A/B testing, so it’s important to work with one at a time.

Here’s where you can structure your thoughts and testing procedure. Based on your target audience, ask yourself if your content, text, images, links, or formatting is most important. Look at what subscribers are clicking in your emails to steer your decision.

After this, you just have to work down the list, starting with the most important variable. This will add more structure to your A/B testing, prevent you from getting contradictory results and quickly improve your email marketing efforts by tackling the biggest problems first.

Intuition isn’t all bad in relation to email marketing, but it needs to be coupled with data and facts. If you use Salesforce, you have a great opportunity to view your analytics in Lightning Dashboards. If you’re interested in learning what they are, how to use them, and how they can be used to impact your ROI, register for our upcoming webinar, “Create Lightning Dashboards to Measure ROI“, taking place on March 15th at 10am PST / 12pm CST / 1pm EST.

Register Today!