So despite the findings included in my last blog post, (indicating that subject lines with uncommon discounts do not, on average, do as well as campaigns with traditional percentage discounts), you want to test them out for yourself? I don’t blame you! As marketers we all know that what doesn’t catch the eye of one brand’s audience may engage our specific subscribers in a very different way. Plus, what fun would our job be if we didn’t try to push the envelope, even just a little bit?

To get started in testing you’ll need to:

1. Establish the test objective

   Is it to test subject line performance, sales, or a combination of factors? Or, is it something else all together?

2. Establish Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as open rate, click rate, transaction rate.
   For example, if you are only testing subject lines, then you will want to use the open rate as your success metric. For a creative test, try using the click rate

3. Select the test method
   A/B testing or multivariate testing? It depends on if you’re changing one element vs many. Or, if you are only testing on one campaign and you want to evaluate the best subject line creative for a single campaign you can use a same day split method. This allows you to test your different versions against a small percent of your population and then send the winning subject line or creative to the rest of the population after a few hours or a day.

3. Test to an audience
   Ensure that test cells are statistically significant based on the metric chosen to evaluate the test.

4. Analyze your response data and determine the winner
   If the test won, then determine why. If not, then think about what you could have done differently and try again

5. Repeat

And remember; never make assumptions or long tern business decisions on short term tests.  Make testing part of your culture and your email program will reap its benefits.

As we’ve discussed on this site before, welcome campaigns are a critical tool in jump starting profitable customer relationships. This week, Experian CheetahMail has a new case study that illustrates how incentivized welcome emails can earn higher order values, click rates and revenue per email.

In the case study, we see that Sundance Catalog was able to increase average order sizes by 2x just by adding a basic incentive to multiple types of welcome emails. Even better, Sundance was able to prove the value of incentives by testing two types of welcome emails — those sent to new subscribers who opted-in by completing an email sign-up form on the website, and those who opted-in as part of their eCommerce checkout process. In both instances, the welcome emails with the special offer outperformed the standard, control message with no offer.

Of course, incentives are not a perfect strategy for every brand. Sundance was wise in their methodology, performing a thorough test before they committed to making any final changes to their welcome email program. As a best practice, we typically recommend that most brands do the same before they begin offering discounts.

To read more about Sundance and welcome email incentives, read the full case study now.

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.

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Email marketers, from the novice to the expert, should always be looking for ways to touch their subscribers in a positive and effective way. There are a plethora of complicated and expensive ways to do this, including purchasing expensive lists and list building services, creating fancy and complex mailing campaigns, and generating robust and often overbearing reporting.

But as helpful as these higher-level endeavors might be, one should never neglect the low hanging email marketing fruit. This fruit will not only provide no-to-low cost wins, but also offer insight that neither breaks the budget nor strains the eyes.

Several simple email strategies include the following:

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Walking into an ice cream shop presents you with many possibilities, as there are numerous flavors and almost limitless combinations available to you. To make the decision process easier, you have the ability to taste samples of a few flavors before making a purchase. From the ice cream parlor’s point of view, whether you go with vanilla, rocky road, mint chocolate chip, or strawberry, there is no specific flavor that would yield a less than perfect conversion at the register. From your point of view, the tasting process has a high impact on the type of purchase you will make.

Driving conversions over the Internet requires a similar philosophy to ice cream sales, only taken one step further.

Email testing should be as routine as sampling flavors at your local ice cream parlor. E-mail marketing, similar to ice cream, lends itself to testing, because you can discover interesting results from sampling among a large pool of variables. If your email subscriber lists are large enough, I recommend sending a small portion of tests and control versions of your e-mail to 20% of your list, then deploying the remaining 80% a couple days later to the winner of the test (or even better, try a random 10-10-80 split).

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I’m particularly fascinated by the phenomenon where something is so bad — so ridiculously inane, unrealistic, repetitive, strange, or low-budget — that it is actually good.

There are countless examples in marketing where this has been the case. For example, it had been said that film executives wanted to change the title of the film Snakes on a Plane to the decidedly less memorable Pacific Flight 121 until Samuel L. Jackson stepped in and said “What are you doing here? It’s not Gone with the Wind. It’s not On the Waterfront. It’s Snakes on a Plane!” He was right. The movie was ridiculous, but everyone in America knew about it before it’s release date despite a limited marketing budget.

Here’s my point: when you think about it, a movie title is a bit like an email subject line; it alludes to what is in store for the audience if they choose to view the full content after clicking/paying. I’m sure that some of you have run subject line tests and felt pretty confident that your cleverest idea was going to win. And I’m sure that some of you have been disturbed to find out that the least clever idea can sometimes be the most effective option.

Have you ever run a campaign test only to discover that the lowest common denominator is actually the best strategy?

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