Walking into an ice cream shop presents you with many possibilities, as there are numerous flavors and almost limitless combinations available to you. To make the decision process easier, you have the ability to taste samples of a few flavors before making a purchase. From the ice cream parlor’s point of view, whether you go with vanilla, rocky road, mint chocolate chip, or strawberry, there is no specific flavor that would yield a less than perfect conversion at the register. From your point of view, the tasting process has a high impact on the type of purchase you will make.

Driving conversions over the Internet requires a similar philosophy to ice cream sales, only taken one step further.

Email testing should be as routine as sampling flavors at your local ice cream parlor. E-mail marketing, similar to ice cream, lends itself to testing, because you can discover interesting results from sampling among a large pool of variables. If your email subscriber lists are large enough, I recommend sending a small portion of tests and control versions of your e-mail to 20% of your list, then deploying the remaining 80% a couple days later to the winner of the test (or even better, try a random 10-10-80 split).

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