Improve E-mail Performance With Testing, Part 2
Ready to optimize your e-mail performance? Start testing! Part two of a series.
Ready to optimize your e-mail performance? Start testing! Part two of a series.
Part one of this series offers an overview on deciding what to test and some tips for developing apples-to-apples test scenarios. Today, we’ll talk specifics about the most common things to test in e-mail marketing: sender lines, subject lines, and the body of the e-mail and the landing page.
Sender Lines
Always keep the actual sender line ([email protected]) the same from send to send. This helps e-mail programs recognize you and deliver your e-mail to the inbox.
Only test the display sender line (“My Company,” or “Me, My Company”) sparingly. This is what recipients will use to recognize your e-mail; if it’s constantly changing, they may not realize the e-mail is from you. But it is good to test:
I don’t recommend using sender lines that only contain a person’s name. If that person changes positions or leaves your organization, you’ll have to change the sender line and recipients may not recognize the new name. And if that person goes to a competitor, she can start sending e-mail and benefit from the fact your customers will recognize the name.
Subject Lines
Subject lines are a great place to test, just be sure whatever you use can be replicated for future sends. I like to construct different types of subject lines, then test those. For a promotional e-mail, for example, you might test subject lines based on one or more of the following:
These are very basic and by no means inclusive. Your subject line can say anything (so long as it’s an honest reflection of the e-mail content), so brainstorm a few ideas and go with that.
For an e-mail newsletter you might test such things as:
I don’t recommend testing the basics — newsletter name, date — because I’ve never seen it win against a subject line that’s specific to the current issue of the e-mail newsletter. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t test it. Here, it’s important to go with what works to get the highest open rate; whether you like it is secondary.
E-mail Body and Landing Page
Things you can test here fall into three general categories: product, offer, and creative. Here are some examples:
Product | Offer | Creative |
---|---|---|
Name | Discount ($) | Format |
Description | Discount (%) | Copy |
Benefits | Incentive | Design |
Austin | 30:51:17 | 758 |
Price | Offer Deadline | Color |
Image | Call to action | Graphics |
It’s fine to test just a subitem from each list. Examples:
Or you can really go wild and test more than one element at a time:
You can also change more than one of these categories. Try a new offer with new creative. Change the product name, description, and benefits. Just remember, if this version wins, you’ll have to use it in its entirety to get the benefit to future mailings since you won’t know how much each element contributed to the increase.
Proper test procedure is still required so results aren’t skewed. In addition to the tips mentioned above:
That’s all there is to it. The more you test, the more you’ll learn. That provides you ideas for other things to test. Try it yourself and let me know how it goes!
Until next time,
Jeanne
Want more e-mail marketing information? ClickZ E-Mail Reference is an archive of all our e-mail columns, organized by topic.