For one, content within email tends to change more often than your typical landing page. This makes optimizing for content more challenging as different topics are likely to garner different levels of interest from the segments within your email list. So results will change each month based on the content alone – making A/B testing the only reliable method for measuring progress.

In addition, email lists themselves prove to be a challenge, as what works for one list may not work for another list. Even within lists, especially aggregated lists, you will see different results based on the value proposition, content, layout, and calls-to-action (CTAs) used in your email.

And to further complicate matters, you are still dealing with a funnel process in which your email must first reach a user (avoiding spam filters, personal filters, etc.), your subject line must interest the user enough to open the email, your email must display properly (with images on and off) and be compelling enough to achieve a click-through to your landing page where the battle for a conversion wages on.

In today’s world of overloaded email boxes, people declaring email bankruptcy, spam filters and everything else, this game is only getting more difficult – for marketers and users alike.

With that said, I’d like to offer up my own favorite email testing tricks and tips. It’s important to understand that what works for one segment, list, or industry will not necessarily work for another. In fact what works one month for a list may not work next month. It’s an ever-evolving process in which you must always challenge your own best practices to maximize your results.

1. Text-only email

This is my silver bullet of email optimization. In a world where everyone wants their logo, business cards, websites, and emails to be as shiny and pretty as possible, it’s easy to forget that email is a text-based medium.

Out of all the emails you actually read each day, how many are HTML vs. text-only? The important emails you receive each day – the ones from your family, friends, and co-workers – are all likely text-based. This means the HTML emails you receive are most likely not from one these aforementioned groups and thus likely less important to you on a personal level.

Obviously there are caveats to this – such as an email from your bank or a Facebook friend request – but the truth is, when you send an HTML email you are already fighting a certain level of banner blindness. If you currently only send out an HTML email, I’d challenge you to A/B split test against a text-only version of your email and measure the results.

2. Story format

Emails are a form of value exchange. In exchange for someone’s time and interest, you must first provide something of value.

One of the easiest, most interesting ways to provide value in an email is to tell a relevant story. Not only can telling a story create interest in your topic, but it also can provide you with a natural sounding CTA of “Continue Reading” or “Read More” that requires less commitment from the user before clicking through to your landing page.

The downside to the story format is it requires you to have an interesting story to tell as well as an audience willing to read through the text.

3. Big button

Sometimes if your offer is compelling enough, all you need to do is give people a place to click. It helps if your email list is already familiar with your brand, is interested and familiar with what you’re offering and needs little explanation before clicking through.

For example, our Marketing Director is drawn to J. Crew’s buttons like a moth to a lightbulb…

The focus should be on the value proposition and the CTA copy as this will determine the commitment level required to achieve a click-through. A “Learn More” CTA will bring more clicks, but less qualified traffic than a “Buy Now” CTA. Experiment with this CTA copy to see what works best for your particular audience and dial in the right amount of click-through vs. conversion.

4. Multiple CTAs

I’ve found that when dealing with large, aggregated email lists, including multiple, different CTAs can help increase click-through on the basis that different people will be interested in different aspects of a topic.

For instance, if you are offering a free PDF download on a topic that you hope will encourage people to provide their email address, and you also have a webinar that does the same thing, go ahead and include a link to “View the PDF” and another CTA to “Sign-up for the Webinar.”

What you’ll find is that offering multiple contrasting calls to action will result in a higher click-through rate as some people will be interested in downloading the PDF, while others will prefer the webinar – two different mediums that attract two different groups of people but achieve the same objective.

5. Digest

If you currently send out a longer email newsletter, I’d encourage you to try a digest format. In the digest format you offer several links at the top of the email that either direct users to a particular article on your website or anchor down to an excerpt within the email itself, followed by a CTA to “read more.”

I’ve found digest emails work well when you have a lot of content to offer and you are able to effectively arrange this content so as to attract a wide variety of clicks. It’s a combination of the story format and multiple CTA emails mentioned previously.

Related Resources

The Five Best Ways to Optimize Email Response: How to craft effective email messages that drive customers to action

Optimize your Email in Three Steps: How one marketer tripled revenue from their house list

Order your custom Email Response Optimization Package

The experiment came from the research library of ThinData 1:1 and was with a large airline that had a strong online presence. They had the goal of improving the level of user engagement (through higher click-through rates and lower unsubscribes) for their customer newsletters. They wanted to test a 1:1 marketing approach and see how much impact a personalized conversation with customers would have.

The Original Newsletter (click-to-enlarge)

First, it will be helpful to see what the original newsletter looked like. There are a few key things to note:

1) The goal of the email was to create enough interest on the part of the recipient to get them to click through to a specific flight offer.

2)  Every element on this email was sent generically to large subscriber segments and included offers without any reference to a recipient’s personal preferences.

3) The only (and it’s debatable) 1:1 marketing technique that the original email design included was the name of the recipient.

The 1:1 Marketing Strategy

One-to-one marketing conversation requires a couple of key ingredients, one of which is insight about your customers. So, to understand their customers better, this company created a “customer preference tool.” This tool took previous behavioral/purchase data and mapped out preferences in five key areas (destinations, airports, hotels, etc.). It also gave customers the ability to update their preferences for each of these areas.

So once they had some solid insight about the preferences of their newsletter recipients, they were ready to start a better conversation.

The New Design (click-to-enlarge)

A new email template was created to customize content according to the five key preference categories of the customers. In fact, the tool was inserted at the top of the email and functioned as a table of contents for the email. It also gave recipients a portal to their own preference center to make any changes.

The rest of the email was organized by an algorithm that gave higher placement to offers with higher preference status to the email recipients.

Instead of displaying all possible offers for a category, offers were filtered according to the preferences of the recipient.

Overall, the new email design created a 1:1 marketing conversation that matched the specific motivations of the recipients.

The Results

As mentioned in the title of the blog post, the results were impressive. For a large company that no doubt had already spent time improving these newsletters, they were able to increase the click-through rate generated from the emails by 21%. And this came by subtracting, not adding more links within the email. The new design also decreased unsubscribes by 60%, which the marketers interpreted as a big thumbs-up from their subscriber base.

Overall, the results of this test underscore the value and potential impact of striving to have a 1:1 conversation in our marketing campaigns.

What does this mean to you?

Ideally, you would have as much information as this company had about their customers, and if it were a perfect world, you would have unlimited technical development capabilities at your fingertips. Well, most of us don’t live in that perfect scenario and creating a true 1:1 marketing campaign like this company might seem a bit out of grasp.

Here’s the good news, 1:1 marketing has a path leading to it and everyone is somewhere on that path. And every marketer, regardless of company size, can improve the conversation they are having with their customers. Today on our web clinic, we will look at the strategic things that marketers of any level can do to improve their 1:1 marketing campaigns. So join us today as we talk about this case study and more during our free web clinic: 1-to-1 Marketing at Four Levels: Strategic ways every marketer can enter into an online conversation with customers

Note: To give credit where it is due, I’d like to point out again that the case study mentioned in this post came from the research library of of Thindata 1:1. Thindata 1:1 is a training partner of ours that provides one-to-one marketing automation solutions. They have done some interesting research in the area of one-to-one marketing and I would encourage you to check them out at www.thindata.com.

Have you ever woken up at 3:19am and had to get an idea typed out, only to start shivering after 45 minutes of typing and realize that you are still in your skivvies?

Your marketing efforts for your business shouldn’t be like that.

Sending out a newsletter, flyer or promotional piece without having all of the elements in place to back that up, is like typing until the sun comes up and then answering the front door while forgetting that you woke up at 3:19 to type something up.

Oops.

I had a client recently call me to ask for a specific photo. I sent him the photo, but was curious as to what he was going to use it for, so I called to confirm and asked a few questions while he was on the phone.

“So, what project are you thinking about using the photo for?”

“Oh, that was for the newsletter that I just sent out…”

“Uh, I don’t remember you asking me to set up any landing page on your website to capture information or support the information in any newsletter…”

“Why would I want to do that?”

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!

When you promote something via email, snail mail, Ads or any other outlet, you should always have your infrastructure in place to support someone’s interest in your product or services. This is not about throwing a marketing grenade and seeing what happens next. This is about reminding people in the desert how thirsty they are and having the only Lemonade stand in a 3,000 mile radius.

When you put out information, you need to always think about how the people who are receiving the information can get more. If you get someone interested in you and then you just walk away, you are missing out on the opportunity that you were trying to create in the first place.

It’s ok to get excited and run with a marketing idea as fast as you can. Just try and remember your pants in the process.

Toff Ward
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Accelerate your business online using Twitter.

Like our colleagues at MarketingExperiments, we at MarketingSherpa believe that nothing provides the better insights into the “right” approach than a good test. A marketer’s personal bias, best guess, gut instinct or assumptions aren’t enough. In fact, they’re often wrong. You have to be willing to let your audience SHOW you what motivates them.

Today in Munich, MarketingSherpa is hosting its second Germany Email Marketing Summit, which features a Case Study that demonstrates the power of testing to determine customer motivation. VNR.de, a publisher of lifestyle and professional advice from experts in their fields, is sharing the results of a list-cleansing/subscriber reactivation campaign they recently conducted.

Winning back “inactive” subscribers

The campaign targeted “inactive” members of their list, which they defined as subscribers that had not opened or clicked an email in 120 days. They wanted to either reactivate those subscribers, or else determine that they were truly inactive and remove them from the list. So they set up a four-message reactivation campaign to encourage a response.

Each message took a different approach to the reactivation effort:

- The first was a survey about email preferences
- The second was a request for subscribers to update their personal information
- The third was a contest to win a book
- The fourth repeated the request to update personal information

What is more appealing than FREE?

Going into the campaign, the team believed the contest offer would have the best response. After all, people like getting free stuff, right?

Maybe not: The contest offer had the weakest open rate and clickthrough rates of the four messages. Its open rate was 60% lower than the best-performing email – the survey about email preferences. And the contest offer’s CTR was 82% lower than the best-performing email.

The good news is that the reactivation campaign was a success overall. They reactivated 9% of the inactive subscribers they targeted – and they won a MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Award for it.

They also learned important lessons about what motivates their subscribers. Their conclusion: “People seem to be most interested when we are interested in them.”

Final lesson: Assumptions are no match for results data. So get testing!

Sean Donahue is the editor of MarketingSherpa, a research firm publishing Case Studies, benchmark data, and how-to information read by hundreds of thousands of advertising, marketing, and PR professionals every week.

As I try to be informative and give back to the Twittersphere, one of my email-related tweets was picked up by a Florida marketing agency that services several metros nationwide. With our Email Optimization clinic series underway, I was more than happy to provide an analysis of a broad-spectrum campaign that they had planned. Luann, their president, was as excited as I was about making a Twitter connection.

With Luann’s permission, I wanted to share my thoughts and recommendations with our readers. Here is an edited copy of the email response that I sent to her:

Hi Luann,

(click image to zoom)

Here are a few thoughts based on the email message creative I got from Noele, along with the requisite assumptions I’ve made. I hope they will be helpful.

There are two important caveats:

1. I don’t believe in best practices. Everything I recommend is normally tested until I find out what really works for the particular product and customer segment.
2. I want to be as helpful as possible, so I am not pulling any punches; the comments below are not a reflection on your company’s competence or reputation—just how they are communicated via this email message.

The fundamentals: Optimizing thought sequences

In optimization, our objective is not to create better design or copy. Our objective is to affect different thought sequences, and design and copy are our tools. A useful way to examine the thought sequences we need to address is through three simple questions that arise in the mind of the email recipient immediately, whether consciously or unconsciously:

1. Who is sending me this email?
2. What is it asking me to do?
3. Why should I do it?

Our job is to answer these questions as directly and quickly as possible using copy, graphical elements, and layout of the email.

Without specific information about your list, I am going to assume (based on email content) that it contains a large segment that has never done business with your company and perhaps has never heard of it.

Communicating Efficiently: Make it an easy read

The body of the email appears singularly focused on its graphic design and a clever visual way to represent what you do. I suspect that your target customers would prefer a plain-English explanation instead.

They would also likely appreciate it being summarized into a strong, benefits-focused headline, supported with several key reasons why they should use your company’s services, rather than your competitors’.

How it appeared in my Outlook preview pane. (click image to zoom)

I am making an assumption about your target customer segment(s), but from my experience—especially with B2B—black text on a white background works best most of the time. There’s rarely a better way to communicate with busy professionals.

Relying primarily on text, rather than images, will likely work better for you because in default Outlook setup with a preview pane, most people will see blank white boxes instead of your message—and promptly delete it. Alt text helps, but not as much as well-formatted HTML text. You need to make sure that your email degrades gracefully: it needs to read acceptably with images turned off and in plain text.

Communicating Value: Make it clear why you are the best choice

Again, there is no real headline here. The question “Is your business missing something?” is so generic that I can’t imagine it being compelling at all. You can have a successful question-format headline, but it needs to point to a specific problem that you know your customer has.

A great way further to support your value proposition is by telling the reader what your customers say about you. It’s more powerful than anything you say yourself.

There is another challenge with communicating value: you are offering a range of very different services. Sent to a large enough list, this will get you calls, but I would invest some time into 1) trying to segment your list and offer only the most relevant services to each segment, and 2) if you can’t segment or still end up with a large “general” segment, help your reader understand which service is right for them.

Communicating Action: Make it clear what to do next

You don’t want to leave this up to the recipients to figure out. That’s what we call “unsupervised thinking.” You need to do most of the work for them—or you won’t get the click.

There is no clear next step. Here’s what I can picture a recipient thinking: “It looks like you just want me to sign up for the newsletter. It’s the biggest CTA (call to action). But I don’t know who you are. I really don’t care about getting latest news postings on your website. If we already have a relationship, why am I getting this generic email?”

In the end, you are not giving the reader a specific reason to contact you. This goes back to building the problem, explaining why you are the best solution, and telling the reader what they’ll get by clicking where you want them to click.

If this is an email to an unsegmented list, I suggest two options to test:

1. Have only one CTA (you can repeat it at the top and at the bottom, but ultimately you should be asking them to do one thing). The job of this email will be to build enough confidence/interest in your company to get a click. Then you can provide options (if relevant) on the landing page.
2. Have several distinct offers, making very clear which one applies to which customer segment or specific problem it’s solving (even if you can’t segment the list, you should know what the key segments are). Then the job of this email is to help the reader quickly decide which offer is most relevant, and click on the corresponding CTA.

I hope these insights will be helpful, and I look forward to hearing about the results you were able to achieve with them.

Sincerely,

Boris Grinkot

To see more email optimization ideas, you can listen to the replay of our last live web clinic, where the MarketingExperiments team offered testing ideas for audience-submitted email marketing messages.

* I’m not counting 2007—come on!

Proper timing = greater relevance

To illustrate how timing might affect open and click-through rates, think about how you read email.  In the afternoon when the day is dragging on and you need a break, do you give each email message a little more time than when you first get into the office in the morning and are confronted with 20 hot items bursting from your inbox?

So would an email with a more complex conversion goal (such as signing up for a recurring subscription) do better with you in the afternoon while a simple conversion goal (like signing up for a free web clinic) might have a better chance in the morning when you’re plugging and chugging and not putting as much thought (and perhaps doubt) into your actions?

While you were sleeping

If you subscribe to our informative email, you know that we send it in the middle of the night. By testing, we learned that email messages sent before 9 a.m. EST dramatically lifted click-through rates for our list. Here are the key takeways from our testing:

• Late-nighters in the management level and ‘indiepreneur’ crowds on the West Coast are opening work email up until the midnight hour. East Coast execs are responsive in the ‘early bird’ hours.
• Subscribers based in Asia and Europe respond to email messages that don’t get buried in their inbox during non-work hours.
• Time zone segmentation is worth a test for any marketer with a substantial international list – especially B-to-Bers.

What works for your audience?

Keep in mind, that for every demographic and persona that is part of your readership, their habits and optimal send time might be different. Test sending out at different times to see what affect that has on not only readership, but conversion – because even in these “tight time zones,” people might just glance at the email, (giving you the open metrics) but save the action for later. However, we all know sometimes “later” never comes.

Speaking of testing, it is not just good enough to just try different send times for entire lists. Aggregate testing like this can get you subpar results and hide the real conversions nuggets. Narrowing the scope to particular segments in your list (which you should always be doing…) will help you see how certain segments respond to timing and allow you to make stronger conclusions.

Sometimes the conversion gems that are waiting to be discovered are not only in the message itself, but how and (in this case) when it is being delivered. It is like when you asked your Mom to borrow the car – you knew not to bother her when she was busy if you wanted a good response.

Good luck in testing.

For a deeper discussion about timing and relevance, you can join our Senior Manager of Research Partnerships, Andy Mott, as he explores Increasing Conversion with Right Time, Right Message Strategies on Thursday, March 11 at 2 p.m. This free BtoB Magazine webcast is sponsored by Eloqua.

Editor’s Note: The MarketingExperiments community is an interactive group with a great deal of questions and answers between marketers and their peers as well as with the MarketingExperiments staff. Occasionally we publish these interactions on the blog when we think there is a particularly good question that our readers can benefit from…

QUESTION:

I recently watched The Five Best Ways to Optimise Email Response seminar by Dr Flint McGlaughlin. I found it extremely enlightening and it provided a lot of food for thought. However, I have a quick question with regards to slide no. 22.

I appreciate your time and I’m sure you receive plenty of mailings of this nature; therefore I will get straight to the point.

In this slide, the recommendation is to change the subject line of the mailing from “Thank You For Making Us Your Florist Of Choice” to “15% Off – Our Way Of Saying Thank You!”

I understand why the wording would be changed to make it more endearing to the receiver but I wondered if the symbols added would increase the risk of the mailing being filtered and more inclined to be highlighted as spam – therefore reducing the success of the mailing.

In my experience I steer clear of any symbols in the subject line when sending large mail shots, especially %, ! and £. Am I being too cautious?

Kind regards,

Chris, BA(hons) Business & Marketing
Marketing
London

ANSWER:

Hi, Chris. Thanks for your question.

If I might broaden the question slightly to interpret its essence as a transferrable principle, could I restate it as…

How much validity is there to the conventional wisdom that, in the Subject Line of an offer email message, numbers, certain symbols (especially £/€/$, %, and !) and “SPAM words” such as “Free” and “discount” will cause a dramatic reduction in deliverability, and consequently effectiveness?

… if so, then it’s surely an important one.

In the case of the particular company and study referred to on Slide 22 – that was precisely one of the questions we set out to answer.

What you couldn’t see in the context of Dr. McGlaughlin’s presentation at the MarketingSherpa Email Summit in Miami is that this particular two-treatment comparative vignette was just a tiny part of a much larger and broader study. We intended to test the specific, widely accepted presumption you mentioned.

We were also exploring a host of other best practices to see how valid they remained through the evolution of regulations as well technical filter changes by email service providers (ESPs) since the time they were first introduced and anecdotally adopted (around 2003-2005).

This was important because we know from our foundational Offer/Response-Optimization principles of “clarity trumps persuasion” and “specificity converts,” that the clearer and more specific subject line – i.e., the one with the “15% Off…” copy – should convert better.

What we found was that there was, in fact, a small but significant difference in deliverability – interestingly, it was more pronounced among the smaller ESPs. In addition, as we had predicted based on the “eme” heuristic, the Open Rate actually declined (…by more than 25%).

In the end, though, the central research question was “Which email subject line will result in the greatest projected net revenue?” As revealed in Dr. McGlaughlin’s presentation, despite the slight dip in Delivery Rate, and the (what would otherwise have been alarming) drop in Open Rate, the Click-through Rate (CTR) to the landing page was 60.3% higher.

What he may not have mentioned is that, in direct answer to the research question, the Treatment subject line yielded a 56% increase in projected net revenue vs. the Control.

So, while it appears there is still at least some validity to the commonly held belief that special characters in the email Subject Line reduces deliverability, our research (this experiment plus two others conducted with different products and industries) suggests that when they serve to do so, these negative factors are dwarfed by the power of clarity.

I hope that’s helpful, Chris.

All the best,

Bob Kemper
Director of Sciences
MECLABS Group, LLC

Dr. McGlaughlin will next be teaching and speaking about email marketing at MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Germany 2010 in Munich on March 8^th and 9^th.

Dr. McGlaughlin’s four-hour workshop and keynote presentation will cover email capture rate and quality, open rates, conversion, and building customer trust and loyalty with email. He will also be conducting live optimization of audience submissions – a lively and always-popular segment.

Our roundtable of research analysts will use your peers’ email messages to share transferable principles that you can use to improve the ROI of your email sends. To give you a firm understanding about what the MarketingExperiments methodologies are based on, we’ll begin the clinic with the below experiment.

As always on web clinic day, we’re giving you an opportunity to use your experience and intuition to see if you can guess which treatment won…

Background: An established financial institution offering online savings accounts

Test Design: This was an A/B/C/D multi-factorial test that pitted three treatments against the control. While we also split traffic between different landing pages to test which combination produced the highest conversion rate, today we’ll focus on which email increased click-through rate. Here are the email versions (out of courtesy to the Research Partner, we have anonymized these email messages):

(click to zoom in)

Control

Treatment 1

Treatment 2

Treatment 3

Results: Before we reveal the results, here’s a chance to test your own marketing intuition and be regarded as an online marketing leader! Use the comments section to let us know which email message you think delivered the highest click-through rate.

Which email generated the highest click-through?

* Control
* Treatment 1
* Treatment 2
* Treatment 3

We’ll post the name of the marketer who guessed the winning email and came closest to the click-through rate gain, so make sure to include your name, title, company, Twitter handle or any other info you would like to include.

The winner and results for this experiment will also be announced live this afternoon at 4 p.m. EST during our free web clinic – The Five Best Ways to Optimize Email Response (Part 3): Special live optimization web clinic.

Congratulations to Stefanie Kelly of Pathway Medical Staffing, the only marketer with the intuition to guess what our tests have confirmed – Treatment 1 delivered the highest click-through rate.

This copy-rich email outperformed the control by 42% by synchronizing to the decision patterns of the recipient through a commonality of language. This email carries a very personal feel and is crafted to capture the recipients’ attention and convince them to click through to the landing page.

Do you shout, brag, or sell in the typical conversations you have in an average day?

If you’re not a professional wrestler, you will likely answer “no” to the above question. Yet, as Dr. Flint McGlaughlin showed in our live web clinic on February 3, many marketing email messages fall into the above traps because they don’t think of email marketing as just a conversation…

And like any good conversation, a few elements are key – clarity, proper timing, a common language, and a focus on how the person you’re talking to hears what you’re saying. Combine these elements with a methodology that allows you to optimize each part in a real-world, feedback-intensive setting, and you’ve mastered the basics of email marketing.

And do it all in a radically honest way – talk to your customers like a person, not like the typical marketer. In the end, being direct is the best way to earn the trust of a skeptical customer.

Dr. McGlaughlin ended this web clinic with live optimization of audience-submitted email messages. This last segment was so popular that we’ve decided to add a part three to our series on email response optimization that focuses exclusively on live optimization.

Dr. McGlaughlin will next be teaching live during a free webinar with our sister company InTouch – Online Lead Generation: How to optimize forms to convert “window shoppers” into leads – on Wednesday, February 17, 2010 at 2pm EST.

“The discomfort was worth it by all accounts!”

The session was very lively and included on-the-spot optimization of audience-submitted emails. Some even suggested cutting lunch to continue with more live optimization. You can watch a replay of the complete presentation below and here are a couple reviews from live attendees:

“Even if this was the third time I attended one of his lectures, I still learn from each new session. Flint is a tremendous speaker and his mathematical approach on all email marketing aspects based on serious testing is amazing.” – Kenny Van Beeck, EmailGarage

“After a reported late influx of attendees, people took to sitting on the floor to listen to the first session, delivered by Dr Flint McGlaughlin. The discomfort was worth it by all accounts!” – Mick Griffin, Get Response

(Replay) Optimizing Email Response – Part 1

Today we are hosting the “Part 2” of this presentation to focus on how to actually craft effective email messages. We will also be taking some additional time to work with and optimize your email campaigns live on today’s web clinic.

Today, we expect Dr. McGlaughlin to be as lively as he was in Miami. We hope you can make it to today’s presentation at 4PM EST.

Now, get some email optimization love of your own

Admittedly, we have already chosen most of the live audience submissions we will cover during today’s call. However, we did save one spot for our blog readers. So, if you have an email you would like us to look at today post a URL hosting the email in a comment or send it to us via email. We will choose one lucky blog reader from the submissions today. Good luck and see you this afternoon.