Subject lines: Everything you know may be wrong. Part 3–The Big Send

In our last post on email subject line testing we set up two groups in ExactTarget to create two random samples of users. Today we’re going to set up our email so as to send different subject lines to each group. The process is pretty basic, and should work with any email system, not just ExactTarget.

The first thing you’re going to want is, well, an email. In our case we have our August Newsletter prepped and ready to go. Now we want to make a copy of that newsletter with a new subject line. In Exact Target this is pretty easy, simply click “create new email”, and in here select “revise existing email”.

Hit next and you will be presented with a new screen:

Here you will want to “select email”, choosing your newsletter…

…then fill out all of the data, including a new email name (may I suggest adding “subject 2” to the originals name?). Here I am also using the same tracking ID’s as our previous email so that the traffic from both get combined in our analytics.

Once you have a duplicate email with a new subject line (and whatever else you want to change, you can test almost anything this way) all that is left is to send them. Click send, then select the corresponding email group (that we created in our last post), click through, and you’re done. Just to avoid any mistakes you may also want to repress group 1 from group 2’s send, and vice versa.

Now all that is left is to send the email, and wait for results.

After your send you can find all of your results under tracking. Each email should be listed separately, with their own stats that you can compare and export.

Yes folks, it is that easy.