Jul 27 2009
Let Data Drive Your Email Design
Sometimes, we at Email Responsibly like to share client success stories that help inform the industry-at-large about ways to improve their email marketing programs. Today we check in with our resident email design guru Stephen Sharp as he talks about a recent victory for the responsible email marketers over at Fit Pregnancy. Kudos to everyone involved!
Recently, Experian CheetahMail’s Creative Services team engaged Fit Pregnancy, a leading women’s magazine, in a creative challenge to increase readership and heighten customer engagement. Our challenge was to strategically design a new email template based on a slew of creative best practices and reporting data from previous campaigns, then test the results.
As a first step, we reviewed Fit Pregnancy’s campaign reporting data to identify strengths and weaknesses pertaining to the existing navigation and content layout. One major area of interest proved to be the ‘product recall’ link taking subscribers to an updated list of potentially dangerous consumer goods. This link alone garnered 50 percent of the newsletter’s average clickthrough activity.
To capitalize on this finding and provide subscribers with quick access to the information they most desired, our Creative Services team placed the product recall link in two places on the email template: above the fold in the form of an apparent, standalone button, and in the ‘News to Use’ section as a text link. A number of other navigational elements were also shifted around within the template design based on reporting data from past campaigns.
To further enhance the visual impact of the email while still preserving the integrity of the overall design, Experian CheetahMail used simple background colors coupled with varying font sizes and clean graphical treatments. In addition, more lifestyle imagery and photography was added to improve readability and create a more engaging template to interact with.
A careful analysis of Fit Pregnancy’s email campaigns pre- and post-creative redesign showed that the new template successfully yielded a 13.2% higher click rate and an 22% more unique clicks than the control message. Now that’s what I call data-driven design!
To learn more about Fit Pregnancy’s successful email template redesign, download the full case study from the Experian CheetahMail website. You can also read Stephen Sharp’s recent interview with DM News about this case study at DMnews.com.
I definitely agree that is important to use data to drive your email marketing campaigns. By just taking a little time to analyze your campaigns, you can learn a lot that will really help for future emails.
Thanks for the response. We see historical data as a big cheat sheet telling us what works, and what should be taken out entirely. Mix that insight with proven email design best practices, and the template’s performance should increase. A little homework goes a long way in this case.