Email Marketing News and Tips

I was recently on a discussion panel at a Newsletter and Electronic Publishing Association (NEPA) luncheon in San Francisco. When the panel was asked for the one important nugget of information we could convey to the audience, the woman sitting next to me exclaimed, "Test, test, test!" I wish I had piped up sooner because I would have said the exact same thing and gotten credit for it!

If there is one thing I’ve learned from my fifteen years in email marketing, it’s that we can always learn more. And the only way I learn is to experiment. Email marketing provides a great (and relatively inexpensive) way to constantly and continuously test.

It’s not like Direct Mail or Advertising, where simple changes sometimes become time-consuming and expensive endeavors. With email, we can change subject lines, tag lines, offers, graphics, and content instantly. If something is not working, we can switch and swap until it does work. And we can measure opens, click-throughs, and, ultimately, conversions very quickly to make the determination right away if your email newsletter is or is not eliciting a response from your customers.

What should you test? Most Emarketers start with the subject line. Testing different subject lines in your email newsletters is the easiest and quickest way to see results. Your open rate will be a clear indicator of how well a subject line is doing. Next, you could test the main offer in your promotion. You might try different graphics. Long and short versions of your email message with click throughs also have very different effects on differing audiences. And if you are promoting products and services and are expecting conversions, you definitely want to vary the products you are pushing.

How do you test? The traditional idea of A/B testing is what most marketers will recognize. In its simplest form, you try two or three different offers on a small but statistically significant portion of your audience to determine which one works the best. Then you send out the bulk of your message with the winning offer. The next time you are working in Blast Wizard, check out the "Varying" capabilities in the "Jobs" section. It’s a very cool facility that allows you to create a merge field with randomly inserted data to easily test and vary different components of your broadcast.

Here is the one big caveat I have to say about drawing conclusions
from your testing results: what works now or has worked in the past may not necessarily work in the future. Your audience is constantly changing. Moreover, their inboxes are getting more and more crowded. As a result, they are getting better at deciding what to read and what to trash.

The bottom line is that no matter how good your email newsletters are, they could be better. Testing and experimenting are the best ways to improve your message - and its ability to get opened.