Category Archives: Testing

Don’t just aim for an open with your subject line

Ever heard someone say the purpose of the subject line is to get the open? This is short sighted and the purpose and impact of the subject line goes much deeper. The thinking behind a subject line should be more than “what will make someone read this email?”

A case in point is some work I’ve recently completed for Coinks Deals. I’d like to share with you what was learnt about subject lines and how to best communicate with a large dormant database.

Coinks Points introduced a new deals service for their members and wished to provide these deal emails to members who responded to an introduction email about them. Coinks have millions of members, including hundreds of thousands of who had been suppressed from contact for over 12 months. The challenge was how to message to their entire member database, including the dormant members.

The messaging strategy I developed was a four email sequence using a high degree of personalisation to make connection and re-establish trust with members. Several tests were developed to optimise each step of the sequence, testing a variety of elements, including of course subject lines.

As always with testing, the results were insightful and I’m going to focus on one of the subject line tests and what you can learn from it.

For the third email in the sequence to the dormant segment, one of the tests was of these two subject lines:

Subject A: Are we still welcome in our inbox?
Subject B: Was it something we said?

The email itself was a short mostly plain email with a few links and a couple of central buttons shown below

The subject line B gave a 67% higher open rate. However, what was interesting to show the impact of the subject line beyond the open was the ratio of clicks on the above two buttons.

For subject line ‘A’ the ratio of clicks on the first button to second button was 6.5 whereas for subject line ‘B’ it was 2.8. Customers with subject line ‘A’ were more inclined to click the first button. The test cell sample size was 12,000 and the difference in clicks was statistically significant.

The difference in ratio was due to the different subject lines, it changed how customers read the message and what they did as a result. In this case “Are we still welcome in your inbox?” prompted the customer to consider this very question and whether their answer is yes or no. Whereas “Was it something we said?” does not prompt the direct question and the more conciliatory tone creates more interest in deals.

In the many tests I’ve run over many clients I’ve time and time again seen that what happens in the email is skewed and changed by the subject line. The subject line should be designed to get the right people to open not the most people, the right people means those most likely to take the action you want. Plus the subject line should frame their thoughts correctly.

The subject line is used by customers to self-qualify, if the subject line does not accurately qualify the right people then customers who might have taken action do not open and conversely some open only to find it’s not the right message for them. In this case the risk is customers become less inclined to open again since they found they wasted their time previously.

Summarising two key learning’s:

When testing subject lines don’t stop evaluation at the open rate, get more insight by looking deeper at which individual links were clicked and the call to action of each, to learn why the subject line created a particular result.
Create subject lines with the call to action in mind. The power and impact of the subject line goes further than getting the read, it’s about getting the action and not just the read.

This was just one test out of many over a series of four emails. The compounded gain across the whole email sequence was an impressive 190%.

Next time you think about subject lines don’t focus on just getting the open but setting up the right thought sequence for the call action.

Acknowledgements: My thanks to Coinks Deals and Emailvision for permission to publish the results from this work.

How to optimise the timing of an abandoned basket email campaign

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Using an abandoned basket email to recapture lost sales and improve website conversion is becoming increasingly popular with website owners keen to optimise conversion in their basket or cart process. For those of you who are unclear on how these emails work, here is a quick explanation.

Your customer visits you website and starts the process of purchasing something from you. However, at some point, before the sale is complete, the customer leaves.. An email is then sent to the customer, encouraging them to return and complete their purchase. These abandonment programmes can range from a single email sent shortly after the basket was abandoned, to multi stage programmes spanning several days. Websites that use them, find they improve conversion, so they are becoming a “quick win” conversion tool.

One of the most common questions from ecommerce businesses, planning this type of campaign is “when is the optimum time to send an abandon basket email?” It’s one of those “how long is a piece of string” questions. It could depend on the type of business you are, and the products or services you are selling. If you are selling small low value consumables, people might make up their mind within hours, but if you are selling larger value items such as investments and holidays, you might need to give your customers a little longer.

To discover the optimal time to send your emails, start by looking at your response data. This will give you an initial guidance as to the length of the conversion window (in time). Look at the customers who abandon their baskets, and track the delay between abandonment and subsequent re-visits and purchase. This type of response curve analysis will give you a good idea of when most people return (is it hours, days, weeks) and it is around this time that your first email should be set up.

I say “start” with response data, as this isn’t all you should rely on to indicate the optimal send time. Abandonment emails are no different from any other type of email marketing, especially in regard to testing. Your data analysis will give you the initial guidance on timing but it will be your testing that will give you the greatest insight for improvement. Once you have established a benchmark for your first email (based on analysis or your customer knowledge) it is important you try sending emails at different time points after abandonment. These can be in addition to your benchmark email, and although earlier emails will inevitably pull some revenue from the benchmark email, it will give you a good idea when the ideal times are likely to be.

So, in short, if I were to choose some “must do’s” for basket abandonment emails, they would be;
• Analyse your data
• Choose your benchmark
• Test to optimise the process

Most importantly, never stop testing!. It is easy to think the process is as optimised as its going to get, but the environment changes around you. Customers change, the economy changes as do the actions of your competitors. The only way to stay on top of all of that is to test, test, test.

Event: Email customer lifecycle: List growth, May 22nd

Join us at the International Email Marketing Summit on May 16, 2012

5 New Year’s Resolutions for an Email Marketer

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Every year we make them, but only occasionally do we keep them. New Year’s resolutions often represent our best intentions, which somehow get sidetracked as “real” life takes over and our time becomes filled with ticking items off “to do” lists and trying to keep our heads above water.

If you’re an email marketer, the same often holds true for the more strategic items on your list, which can be overlooked in an effort to get the next email out the door. However, as one of Return Path’s executives is known for saying, hope is not a strategy. Just wanting something to change doesn’t make it so. When thinking about the New Year’s resolutions you’d make for your email program in 2012, I recommend creating a realistic plan for sticking to these:

I will make time to test. This is a fundamental and essential best practice for any email marketer to follow. Without a testing plan, you simply won’t know the levers to pull to positively impact your email program’s performance. Instead, you’re just guessing as to what works, what doesn’t, what resonates and what misses the mark. Start by regularly testing the most basic email program elements with an A/B split test, like subject lines, and work your way up to multivariate testing of creative elements, like images, calls-to-action and landing pages.
I will define (and track) metrics to measure performance. What metrics are most important for measuring email program success? For most marketers this includes some combination of deliverability, open, click-through and conversion rates, but depending on your business model, your subscriber base and the desired responses you’re looking to generate from the email channel (i.e., purchases, leads, downloads, web traffic, etc.), creating a customized list of KPIs is essential for measuring trends over time. I continue to be amazed by the number of companies I come in contact with that are blindly sending email without any capabilities for tracking response rates.
I will be more focused on engagement. An email’s primary purpose is to drive an action. This can be anything from getting a subscriber to read what’s in an email, take a survey or walk them through a multi-step purchase process. But what about inactivity? Chances are you have a reasonably high percentage of subscribers who were once engaged and interacting with your messages, but have lost interest over time. These subscribers are likely deleting your messages without reading them or have set up rules to automatically route your messages to an “unimportant” folder, like in Gmail’s priority inbox. So what changed, when did it happen and, most importantly, why? Understanding what keeps your subscribers engaged over the long-term will be increasingly important for getting delivered to the inbox, staying there and maintaining high levels of activity.
I will reengage with my inactives. This is the next logical step. Stop focusing on list quantity and concern yourself with its quality. The health of your email program depends on it. Inactives can represent everything from true spam traps, recycled email addresses and unknown users to subscribers who once found your emails relevant and no longer do. Take action and remove the less than clean segments of your list that represent bad data or old data and create a strategy for reengaging with existing subscribers who are still valuable to your business.
I will monitor the competition. Standing out from the inbox clutter will continue to be a challenge as the volume of email increases, and this includes differentiating your brand and value proposition from your competitors. If your competition is incorporating features like geo-targeting, real-time inventory updates, offer count-downs in real-time, customized content and personalization elements into their email messages, what effect will that have on revenue and engagement, and how can you stay one step ahead? These insights are key as brands compete for subscriber mind-share in a crowded and increasingly mobile inbox.

As the saying goes, “even the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” However, committing to at least some of these New Year’s resolutions will ensure your email program is set up for success in 2012 and beyond. So, let’s toast to that!

5 Ways Email Marketing Must Adapt to Remain Relevant

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A couple of weeks ago, before I flew to the States and entered into a turkey-induced coma, I shared with you some thoughts on five ways email marketing is thriving in a “mocial” world. Well, as we all well know “thriving” doesn’t come without its fair share of challenges or effort. So, in that vein, here’s a look at five key challenges email marketing faces to stay relevant in a world intertwined with mobile, social and local marketing.

1. Focus on Deepening Relationships. The most savvy email marketers are adopting the long-held belief that email marketing is best suited as a relationship medium. Email programmes today are about adding more depth to customer relationships and expanding connections that already exist with the brand. Use social media to create buzz and expand brand awareness. Use email to carry that first interest through the customer life cycle.

2. Design and Test for Multiple Devices. Email marketers face a design and testing conundrum with a myriad of new devices on the market. In fact, by the close of 2011, more than forty new tablet devices will have been introduced to the global market. Email marketers need to make sure their messages are not only readable across of these different platforms and devices, but optimised for that experience.

3. Trigger Messages Based on Behaviour. Focusing on triggered and transactional communications allows email marketing to deliver an experience that can never be replicated in social media. Real-time, behaviour-based communications triggered by a purchase, product shipment, event registration, etc. allow email marketers to connect with consumers with relevant information times precisely to the consumers interests.

4. Integrate Well with Mobile and Social. In order for email to thrive in this new world, it cannot live in isolation. Integration with social media for opt-ins is a must. And, design and optimisation for mobile devices is also critical.

5. Concise Messages and Focused Design is Key. Each month it becomes less likely that your email message is being read on a PC with a large, bright 19” display. Not only because Apple’s market share is growing along with monitor sizes – but because consumers and prospects are increasingly using mobile devices to triage and manage their inbox on the move. The content, layout, and design of email messages needs to adapt to be more scannable, actionable, and designed for a touch experience.

The beauty of email marketing is that it never stagnates. Ever. The technology, practices and content strategy behind winning email marketing programmes is continuously evolving, and so long as it does, I believe email marketing has a bright and productive place in the marketing mix. For now, we have a lot of work ahead of us to adapt our programmes to thrive in this new, Mocial world. Let’s get started.