How
Testing Ratchets Up Your Email Campaign Performance
By June Li
continued from main page
Once
you have an address list of sufficient size, you can begin
to benefit from one of the less talked about but most beneficial
feature of email marketing. Testing -- Slow but steady improvements,
campaign after campaign. Are your campaigns currently stand
alone? Do you experiment and learn so that each campaign
teaches you something new that you can apply to improve your
next campaign?
How
to use testing strategy to improve your ROI
Testing
that’s
properly designed and deployed will deepen your insight
about your readers and raise conversions in future
campaigns. Here are three metrics with examples of over
10 variables you can choose to test. No additional software
is needed. This uses variations of your text, layout and
images:
Email open
rate:
•
How does your ‘from address’ affect your open rate?
Are you more successful if it’s from you (i.e. a person),
or your company, or a campaign brand?
•
What if you change your subject line? Does personalizing the
subject line (i.e. adding the recipient’s name) increase
opens? Does adding (or removing) the name of your newsletter
or using a specific subject result in higher open rates?
•
What happens if you change what day of the week or time of
day you send your emails?
Click Through
rate from opened email to landing page:
•
Will a change in the layout from image to text affect the click
through rate? Is there an optimum mix for your list?
•
Is the click through rate affected if you locate the image
on the right instead of the left side of the email?
•
What happens to click throughs if we put the call to action
outside the image instead of on the image?
•
Does personalization (Dear Bob) help or hurt our click through
rate?
•
Are click throughs higher if we move our call to action higher
in the email?
•
Does repetition in the email affect overall clickthroughs to
a landing page?
•
Do click throughs increase if we expand the text in our ‘read
more’ link to a longer, more descriptive phrase?
List
Usage:
•
Do targeted emails to smaller lists work better than general
emails to a larger portion of the address list? Is it worth
the extra work?
•
Does one information laden email result in higher opens or
click throughs compared to shorter more frequent
emails, where each email pertains to a different topic?
Having
decided what to test, how many emails should
be included in a test? Larger lists allow you
to run more
tests per campaign.
The required number per test should be calculated
specifically for each test. It depends on the
baseline rate you
are testing, the size of the difference you think
you’ll see and what
level of statistical significance you want in
your test. For example, if you’re testing
subject lines and want to test whether a possible
1% difference
in the open rate is statistically
significant, you will need a larger sample if
your starting baseline is 8% compared to a 4%
baseline
level. If you want
to be 95% confident that there’s a difference
between two subject lines, you’ll need
a larger sample than if a 90% confidence level
(i.e.
10% chance of concluding incorrectly)
will do.
Not
every experiment will result in a significant improvement. But
you will always
learn something
useful, even if
it’s
what not to do again. To discuss your specific
testing needs in more detail, contact
Mona Belcher at e-Marketing Strategies.
June
Li
Managing Director
ClickInsight
www.ClickInsight.ca
Get some insight into June Li
"Even
a mistake may turn out to be the one thing necessary to
a worth while
achievement."
Henry Ford, 1863-1947, American Industrialist |
