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Many reasonable folks out there spend a lot of time and frustration in the search for the ‘perfect’ call-to-action. The good news is that with A/B testing, you can chose two suitable one-liners, then let the crowd decide which is their favorite!

If you’re curious about the difference one line can make when it comes to the responsiveness of your emails, here’s a quick example. We launched a survey amongst a group of active customers, to help us prioritize improvements to our app this year. As we were keen to receive as many responses as possible, we ran an A/B test using two versions of our survey email. Each email contained a different text-link to the survey, so we determined the winner based on which link received the most clicks.

Here are the two different emails we ran:

Version A

Version B

Difference seems fairly subtle, right? Not until you see the results:

The winner (Version A) achieved an estimated 51% increase in clicks over Version B! This equated to around 2,230 more customers clicking through to our short survey. We certainly didn’t expect that dramatic a lift, however it does go to show that a simple call-to-action (“Tell us what we can do better”) is often, the most effective. So, if you’ve got two strong CTAs in mind, why not give both a shot and let your readers choose. You may be surprised by the difference one line can make.

Do you have an A/B testing success story, or have you learnt something curious from your results? Let us know in the comments below!

A few weeks ago, we tipped our hat to Panic software’s inventive permission reminder email. It sure got us yaddering about a number of unique techniques and tactics, however, there was one simple line that many emails include, yet often get wrong:

Letting the email recipient know how they joined the list may seem really simple and straightforward, however unless you give it a little thought, it can go all circular. For example, here’s an incorrect (yet very common) permission reminder message:

You are receiving this email from ABC Widgets because you signed up for the ABC Widgets mailing list.

Well, yes, that’s totally the reason why I’m getting the email, but where did I sign up for the ABC Widgets’ list in the first place?

Last year, we covered how to capture and display the source of your subscribers. Apart from being nice to know from an analytics point of view, having this information handy is very useful for permission reminder messages.

Making it clear and visible in your email as to where your recipients signed up is best practice, especially if you don’t send email on a regular basis. For example, each month, our newsletter list grows by roughly 10%. That means that 10% of our subscribers are receiving our newsletter for the first time. If you sign up at the beginning of our cycle, then don’t receive an email for 4 weeks, there’s a good chance you’ve forgotten about us, right? Hopefully not, but here’s some clarification as to why you’re hearing from our team:

So in essence, an appropriate permission message is something like:

You are receiving this email because you signed up via our [source].

The result: Less spam complaints and more trust towards you as an email sender. Like with a lot of email techniques, one line can make all the difference.