Ever since we launched our automatic email optimizer, we’ve been tracking all this wonderful A/B testing data on our system.

We analyzed 1,720 A/B tested campaigns, sent to 6,226,331 inboxes (we only included campaigns sent to over 500 recipients).

Overall, we found that A/B split winners did better than non-tested campaigns. By how much?

Before we give you the exact numbers, test your email marketing aptitude and pick the winning subject line from these real life A/B email tests conducted by our customers:

Winning Subject Lines by Open Rate
Test Group “A”Test Group “B”
Don’t Forget Mom…Gifts Mom Will Love!
Protect Yourself From the Sun This Summer…The Best Sunscreen, Hats, Rash Guards and More…
[COMPANY]: March [COMPANY] MailSpring Update from [COMPANY]
[COMPANY] March NewsletterMarch is National Crochet Month
[COMPANY]: France River Cruise & Golf – Last Call[COMPANY]: Last Call for France River Cruise & Golf
Computer Security Quarterly – Spring ’082007 Record Year For Data Breaches
Coupon Enclosed – Save on Printer Ink, Toner, Paper, Storage Media Now – HP, Xerox, Canon, Brother, Dell & MoreNews & Discounts from [COMPANY] – Savings on Printer Supplies from HP, Xerox, Brother, Canon and More
[COMPANY] Easter Newsletter – Free Shipping[COMPANY] Easter Newsletter

Read More


We just had a customer create her email content in Microsoft Word. Then, she pasted from Word into her HTML email, and sent a test to herself. That’s normally when most people learn how bad Microsoft Word is for making emails (it adds a whole bunch of code that breaks your email design). But this user never caught that, because she checked her test email in Microsoft’s Outlook 2007 (which uses Microsoft Word to render HTML email). So to her, everything looked just fine. So she sent the broken email to her entire list. Ouch.

In our experience, Microsoft Outlook has always been a very “forgiving” email app. Almost anything will work in Outlook, including videos in some cases. So if you want to do some serious email campaign testing, download a few other email programs. Mozilla Thunderbird is a good start. Of course, if you don’t have the time or desire to download a bunch of email programs and sending lots of test campaigns to each one, you can always use our built-in Inbox Inspector.