Private (Email) Lessons

June 4th, 2009 Chris

As I’ve mentioned on many occasions, what works and what doesn’t is often a complete mystery when it comes to on-line marketing. I’m sure it has to do with how our brains are wired and we respond to one stimulus versus another.

The best that I (and most on-line marketers) can prescribe is to do these three things: 1. Test, 2. Test, 3. Test some more. That is the best (and often only) way to figure out how to optimize your marketing efforts. And of course steal ideas of people that have done the testing for you!

So this week I thought I’d share a couple of my lessons learned from recent email marketing testing…

Lesson #1 – Subject Line

I hate to actually share this since the more people that do this, the less effective it will be… We did an experiment where we put the source of the email on the subject line of our newsletter blast. You’ve probably seen a few in your inbox like this.

Specifically, we tested Subject: [Engage] Engaging Ideas versus Subject: Engaging Ideas.

Turns out that by putting the [Your Company Name] in the subject line, we found open rates increased by over 5%.

I can rationalize these results with my own observations that emails with this consistent subject start stand-out from the other clutter in your inbox. And as users become more used to seeing it from you, they are more likely to automatically open them.

Of course the downside is that if you spam your users to much, they are also more likely to automatically ignore your emails with this method. So, as always, always try to give your readers something valuable every time you hit them…

Lesson #2 – Embedded Links

Virtually every call to action with email marketing involves a user clicking on a link. And of course we always try to make it look pretty by having the actual link URL behind the scenes. It makes the email easier to read and allows a more directive call to action – ex. Click here now!

But what about folks that have been programmed to not click on links in emails due to security concerns? What about those people that have screwed up their MIME settings and when they click, it just opens a browser but doesn’t go to the specified URL (my browser was like that for two months recently…)?

What we’ve started to do is include both the embedded link as well as an explicit statement of what address to go to. Here’s a recent example:

 

 

 

The results: we receive about 10% of the actions from people that copy and paste the link in their browser versus those that simply click the embedded link. That’s 10% of folks that we wouldn’t get otherwise.

Well, that’s it for today. More testing to follow…

Got some of your own test data – leave a comment and share!

C.

Posted in E-mail, Marketing | No Comments »