Email marketing: don't guess, but test

To raise the click-through and conversion rates of their e-mail marketing campaigns, companies are required to thoroughly test their e-mails before launching a campaign. During a recent Friday Food, Pieter Wuyts from the Belgian specialist e-mail marketing company - 8 seconds (www.8seconds.be) - presented the ‘real time multivariate’ testing technique. It is restricted to the showing of several different images, for example of the incentive that the recipient can receive. This test method identifies which images lead to the desired results. As soon as it becomes apparent that one particular image reaps better results than another, the actual mail recipients will then be sent just that one image.

Email Marketing: don’t guess, but test

Our mail boxes get flooded with emails from companies trying to sell things, so to raise the click-through and conversion rates , companies are required to thoroughly test their e-mails before launching a campaign. During a recent Friday Food, Pieter Wuyts from the Belgian specialist e-mail marketing company  - 8 seconds (www.8seconds.be) -  presented the ‘real time multivariate’ testing technique.
Companies invest a lot of effort in optimizing their email marketing campaigns. The effectiveness of the campaigns is measured both by the amount of people who click through on a link as well as by the amount of people who actually buy things or carry out the desired action. The more targeted the email is to the recipients’ personal preferences , the more attention they will pay to the email.

Measure is knowledge

Email marketers tend to use A/B-testing to measure the effectiveness of messages.  Additionally, a certain number of emails get sent to that same number of test groups. Based on the effect of those emails, the sender will decide which variant is eventually used for the campaign. This approach does have some disadvantages. These tests can be quite time consuming and it is not entirely clear what the  deciding elements are.

The language of images

8 seconds have developed a new test method, which delivers faster results. It is restricted to the showing of several different images, for example of the incentive that the recipient can receive. This test method identifies which images lead to the desired results. As soon as it becomes apparent that one particular image reaps better results  than another, the actual mail recipients will then be sent just that one image.

Pulling a pint

An example of this approach is a campaign that was run by an operator who tried to attract new clients through its existing subscribers. During the test, three different images were shown of what the reciever could win if they were to bring in a new prospective client: an iPod, a Nokia 1208 or a home draft beer dispenser. After 6,000 e-mails, it became clear that the beer dispenser  scored the highest. So the following 70,000 recipients only received an image of that particular item,  which resulted in the desired outcome.

Don’t think

Some other lessons were learnt by Wuyts based on the recent tests performed by 8 Seconds. Tests showed that e-mail readers want to think as little as possible , preferring to  just follow their intuition. An action button with an arrow leads to better results than a button without an arrow. Another  suprising conclusion is that consumers appear to have become immune to the ‘loud’ discount announcements so often used in e-mail marketing.