It's a New Year! Don't Screw It Up!

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Bang! It's seconds after midnight on January 1, 2013, and that was not the sound of champagne corks. It's the realization that you have the chance to start fresh; no more lousy year-end open rates to follow you, no more disappointing click-throughs to keep you up at night; this is your year to make things right.

Now that a whole calendar year has passed, I encourage you to take full advantage of this rare opportunity to learn from your past mistakes. You have a year's worth of data at your fingertips, and if you're not putting that to work for you, then you're seriously missing out.

Have you ever wanted to know the results of a test, but didn't have a large enough sample size? Weren't you ever curious which day of the week your emails tend to receive the most love? Well, do it to it! Export every possible variable you can from your 2012 email data (launch time, day of the week your message launched, subject line, topic, etc) and put all the raw data into one giant spreadsheet; leave no stone unturned! Then, let the sorting fun begin. What happens if you sort by month? By topic? By send time? By audience size? Do your open/click results fall higher or lower with each variable? Take notice of any trending you see and write it down. Make sure to take into account the awesome and terrible results, and then make it your resolution to not repeat any negative behavior.

This is the year of no excuses! So what are you waiting for?! Export, sort, rinse, repeat…