If you've been reading this newsletter for a while (thanks, by the way), you've probably become accustomed to it like the sweet humming sound of your refrigerator or the way your underwear feels.
Psychologists call this habituation. When something keeps happening without a new threat or unexpected reward, our caveperson brain gradually pays less attention to it. But change the pattern (like an email with a new layout, an unexpected image, or going overboard with a banana-yellow theme), and you trigger an orienting response.
This creates an interesting problem for A/B tests. A redesigned email may perform better because it is clearer, easier, or persuasiver (not a real word). OR it may perform better because it briefly startled everyone awake into that orienting response mode. Once the redesign becomes the expected design, the lift in performance may disappear... right along with everyone’s interest in noticing it.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t test new designs, or subject lines, or CTAs, or send times, or offers, or whatever else you’ve been confidently guessing about. It means one winning send isn’t a new universal truth. Follow the test past the first metric, repeat it after the novelty wears off, and make sure you know what you actually changed.
And if you are curious about the A/B tests we're running and ideas you can test too, we wrote an article about that.
