Sonicko Consulting

When most online marketers think of testing they think of traditional usability, focus group, multivariate, a/b, and other common forms. Few marketers, except those who specifically focus on email marketing think of all of the testing that goes into the segmentation of email lists, email blasts, landing pages, and a topic that we previously discussed, external factors.  I’m one of those people who sees an industry average open rate of 25% and asks why I can’t get 30%. Why is click rate so low at 3%? Why can’t it be 5%? In short I believe that I can always do better, and testing is one tool that online marketers have to make informed business decisions. Once you have achieved an open rate that is in line with your expectations and exceeds industry standards for your particular vertical you can move onto increasing click rate and subsequently your end goal: conversion rate.

Assuming that you have segmented your email marketing lists into contextualized groups and you’re offering a contextualized email blast then you’ll want to test out at least one other variation. Think of this as being very similar to A/B or MVT testing for your website. Most responsible web strategists and marketers don’t roll out a completely new website without testing it out. The same principles apply to email marketing. If you have a new template, format, personalization, or other element that you would like to incorporate test it out on a subset of your list before you roll it out to your entire list. You certainly don’t want to see a spike in unsubscribes or abuse complaints simply because of not spending a little extra time to create a variation. Most email marketing software applications out there today offer A/B testing and reporting to help you get some better ideas as to how to improve future blasts. In consulting clients some of the primary areas that I like to test include:

1. Whether personalization inside the email affects click rate
2. What tagging each link differently with web analytics to see what users are clicking on
3. What offer or incentive works better in enticing users to click through
4. Whether bullet points, numbers, or dashes makes a difference
5. Whether certain creative elements work better than others
6. Whether size in width plays a role in your template
7. What is the optimum number of images to include
8. Whether length of the article plays a difference
9. Whether users will click to an online version of your email
10. What call to action works best in getting clicks?

The key thing to note with email marketing is that like websites you can utilize A/B testing but it has the same limitations. You can test A vs. B but you only want to change one element at a time to understand what changes do individually, not grouped together. If you do group all changes together you won’t know if it was the creative, call to action, width, format, etc. that contributed to the change in metrics that you receive. Testing out individual elements will take some time, but will produce the most statistically significant results in which you can make informed business decisions about how to take your email marketing going forward.

Email Marketing is still a widely used online marketing tactic, and can successfully be blasted out to your mailing lists to promote services, announce coupons, communicate your brand, launch new products and services, etc. As email open rates continue to decline here are some tips to increase your open rate. In the near future we’ll look at increasing CTR once you’ve had them actually open the email.

Headline

• Create a sense of urgency
• Play on curiosity
• Add in controversial headline
• Should be 35 characters or less
• Personalize the subject line

From Address

• Try changing the from name
• Try changing the from email address

Testing

• Create email accounts at all major email providers (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.)
• Test to see if any of our email is going into spam
• If so we’ll need to get on a clean domain to send them out
• Test with and without images as some email software is blocking based upon images

Day of the Week Average Open Rate

• Sunday 41.1%
• Saturday 36.7%
• Wednesday 34.0%
• Friday 32.8%
• Tuesday 29.6%
• Thursday 24.6%
• Monday 23.2%

Time of Day and Format

• 8:00AM EST had the highest open rate
• 66% send as plain text (0.46% undeliverable rate)
• 24% send mime format/HTML (0.56% undeliverable rate)
• 10% send HTML only (1.09% undeliverable rate)