What makes an email promotion successful may sometimes seem like a mystery; difficult to reproduce, organic, and intangible. The answer often lies in the details. Maximizing the effectiveness of your email efforts often means paying attention to the little things like Testing, Timing and Tracking - the "Three T's of Email Marketing." You'll be astounded at how just paying close attention to these three principles will increase the success of your email campaigns by leaps and bounds! In this first of a three-part series, we'll cover the importance of testing.
Test, Test, Test ! Testing is often overlooked by businesses because time pressures or staffing issues hinder their ability to focus on preparation. All of the effort goes into just getting the email newsletter or promotion out the same time every month, so no effort is made to send a few small test emails first. Missing the opportunity to learn something with each mailing is a big mistake, and the potential for learning is huge.
Your goal by sending a test in the first place is to make sure your full-scale mailing gets read my the most eyeballs, encourages the highest click-through rates, or creates the most sales.
Also - TESTING WORKS! Testing should be a basic part of each marketer's email strategy.
Take the following steps:
1. Identify promotional goals then test around those goals.
To maximize the number of redemptions for your in-store coupon, try testing subject lines, the dollar amount of the coupon, the length of time it is valid, or the placement of it in the body of the newsletter. All of these factors will effect how many customers open and respond to your message.
The most effective promotions typically "cut to the chase," and present the "call to action" or offer within the subject line and the first paragraph of the email. However, some products and services may require a lengthier, soft sell approach. The key is knowing your audience and your product well enough to make an educated guess as to what format will drive the highest response. Once you have 2 or 3 ideas, run tests to determine which works best!
2. Test with a small portion of your list first.
Many businesses get itchy trigger fingers when it comes time to send an email and they blast their first draft off to their entire audience. The problem with this approach is gauging success. Testing to smaller audiences initially will allow you to determine what elements were successful, and which elements were unsuccessful.
Start with small segments. If you have 50,000 names in your database, start by setting aside 2 or 3 segments of about 5,000 names each with which to do your testing, that will leave 35,000 names for which to mail the "winning test." The volumes you select for the tests are important if you want statistical significance, however some lists are not large enough to yield large test cells. Bottom line is, use enough names in each cell to get a good read on your response rates.
3. Modify only one variable at a time.
If you want to test the 15% coupon vs. the 10% coupon, do not also modify the subject line on the 15% coupon test. To accurately determine which coupon is more effective at creating customer response, the only variable that can be different is the value of the coupon. For that same reason, you must do your best to ensure that the name segments you choose are a random sample so that no difference in the tests can be explained by list characteristics.
Same concept goes for those testing newsletter content. If you want to see which article placement encourages the highest click-through rates, don't also change the length of the greeting paragraph, the graphics, or the subject line. Other Business-to-Business communications should be approached in the same way.
It is also important to make sure you select a "control" for your test. The control should be what has proven in the past to work the best, or at least is your "standard" format for this type of communication. Important thing is to vary only one attribute in each of the tests - all other portions of the email should be just like the control. Also, to reduce any effect from time differences, all tests and the control should be mailed at the same time.
You can see, that each test included only one new variable that is different from the control. This may seem tedious at first, but the detail information you gain from testing appropriately will be valuable in the long run.
4. Test. Fire. Adjust.
Ensuring that the tests are set up properly and have a strong chance of "beating the control" version is probably the most important focus for testing. Doing it right, will allow you to read the test results and know that they are accurate. Companies focusing on a business audience will gain as much by testing as those mailing directly to consumers.
Once you have mailed your tests, spend time reading the results with the reporting available to you. myMailGenie tracking allows for real-time online tracking of delivery information, open rates, click-through rates and percentages.
