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.

And, of course, several days later… everything is still broken. But as they say… the show must go on.

This coming weekend is my university reunion. Which year? you ask dear reader. I’m afraid that vanity prevents me from telling although it’s a depressingly round number. I’m actually not going as I’ve got other things going on and, of course, I left it to the last minute so there is no place to stay in Kingston.

I have to admit that there are many folks that I’ve not seen for many, many years that I’d love to catch up with. Both in the spirit of friendship as well as a morbid curiously to see whose fatter and balder.

There is one gentleman – err… man – I remember very well as being a complete Casanova. It’s not that he was particularly handsome or charming – it’s that he had incredible perseverance. If we were out and there was a girl that he was interested in, he would try and try again to get her number. While sometimes, there would be a threat of a restraining order, just as often he would be successful after multiple approachs. And that was in sharp contrast to those of us who would get shot down and quickly moved on, finishing the evening with no numbers…

I couldn’t help but think of that story in the context of our sales push last week. We had a offering with a relatively high level of investment (~$1K). It was a great deal and we had a three-step sales campaign – that is, three outbound emails to our prospect base.

The response rate for the first email: 0%. I was very sad.

The response rate for the second email: 0%. I was suicidal.

So with trepidation, we sent out the third and final email while I scanned the help-wanted ads. Low and behold – the orders began immediately to come in and were steady for the rest of the day.

So, what happened?

I attribute the last-minute success of the campaign to two important features of our efforts:

1. Multiple Touches

We’ve found that you have to hit people multiple times with an offer. Why? In some cases it’s just that people are busy and won’t necessarily be reading everything you send them.

Also, we have to remember that people buy when they are ready – not when you want. By hitting them several times, you’re more likely build up awareness and interest until finally, when you hit them again, they are ready to take the plunge.

I know someone selling a $5K product who has found it takes, on average, 9 touches before someone purchases.

2. A Deadline

Our offer also had a cut-off day: a final date and time for a prospect to take advantage of this great offer. Our last email blast that generated all the orders went out on that last day of this offer.

Again, people are often busy (and occasionally lazy) and put things off. So, they delay purchase decisions until they are forced to make a decision. If you can remind them of that deadline as it comes up – essentially forcing them to make a final purchase decision – the orders will come. Otherwise, it’s just to easy to put it off until after the offer is no longer available.

So, when you’re designing your marketing and sales campaign – make sure you have multiple steps to hit prospects several times. And make sure your offer has a deadline – even if it’s artificial, it’s necessary to motivate prospects to become customers.

C.

OK, probably not the very first PC but the first popular one. In fact, to call it a PC is not fair and some may even suggest sacrilegious. It was an Apple II+ and in the early 80s, it was very cool.

Fast forward several years (I would appreciate you not doing the math) and, while having dinner with a friend from New York, I first saw the iPhone. No two ways about it, it was cool. And on July 11th, when they first came to Canada, I had to have one.

Luckily, a friend of mine at my former employer had a line on an unlikely place for a stache of iPhones that morning – the corporate head office of a local reseller. So, I crawled out of bed at 6am and headed out to their office where, along with my friend, we perched in our lawn chairs in line for the phone.

While lots of people lined up at other retail stores that morning, there was perhaps no more pathetic sight than that of two guys, sitting in lawn chairs for hours, all by themselves. Yep, it was such a good plan that no one else came. We sat there by ourselves as every employee coming to the office walked by, shaking their heads. We looked goofy.

Of course, after we got our iPhones, all was good. It is indeed everything that people say. After years on a Blackberry, it was very cool to see our company’s emails coming in with all their full HTML formatting, looking good…

That was now. Three months ago, those emails would have looked goofy. Month after month, we’d been pumping out emails that looked great in Outlook 2003. Then a friend of mine in the email marketing business warned me about Outlook 2007. Turns out that Microsoft’s implementation in 2007 depricated a bunch of different HTML functionality. The result is when I looked at our emails in Outlook 2007, the formatting blew up – it looked goofy. And our emails never looked quite right in GMail. And I don’t even want to think what they would have looked like on my iPhone.

What did we do?

The first thing we did was to remove all <style> commands and moved to in-line CSS. In addition, we converted everything to tables. This is the kind of stuff your web developer should be able to do.

A really cool tool we used was provided by Campaign Monitor. Their testing site allows you to pit your email against virtually every web, thick and mobile email client. For the micro business, this is a god-send. You literally get something that looks like the screen shot below… Do up your template and test it – it only costs $10 a shot.

So – if you haven’t done testing on what your emails look like, how do you know you don’t look goofy?

C.

We have debated the use of “Free” in our emails to our base. Would it get through or would it be stopped as spam. For about a year, we’ve avoided it and used terms like “no-cost”, “complimentary” or “it’s fizzle my bizzle” (that one’s just for Snoop).

All those words are lammo campared to FREE but if half the emails aren’t going to get through ’cause they get tagged as spam, then it’s better not to…

So, like most things, we put it to the test… And the envelope please…

“Free” kicked butt – again and again, our response rates have been higher using the word. Debate closed!

But not so fast: that one word is just one of the myriad of factors used to decide if your email is spam. The reputation of your sending ISP to the percentage of HTML code versus text to the use of specific words can all impact your score. And of course, it varies from one spam filter solution to another.

If you’re a big company, you’ve likely got an email provider with all sorts of helpful services on this front. As a micro business, however, it’s tougher.

What do we do? We take a sample of our emails (a newsletter, a sales tip, a promotional offer, etc…) and run it through a great service from Campaign Monitor. They do a bunch of stuff but one thing that we use is their spam testing service where for about 10 bucks, you can test your email against a variety of spam filters (example screen shown below).

Occasionally test your emails, find out what is driving your spam rating and fix it. That way you’ll maximize the number of emails that actually get to your clients and prospects. And you can say “Free”.

Chris

Fast forward a few months and – low and behold – I have become an unabashed, recidivist plagiarist. While this probably sounds worse than it is (especially if you try to say it out loud three times fast), it still is a pretty big change for me. I come from an environment where thought typically needed to be original and marketing product had do be developed from scratch. The result was a lot of hunched backs and banging keyboards as new prose was developed for each marketing piece in the business.

I’m not saying that’s bad – nothing would be worse than having a CxO prospect get it in their head that a technology company rips off IP from another – even if it is just the marketing stuff. So much for thought leadership. But when it’s just you against the world – that just doesn’t seem as important.

Case in point, we do a fair bit of email marketing (ad passim, ad nauseum) and we’ve been having pretty good results to date. Then, the other day an email from a guy named Dan Kennedy arrived. He sells marketing systems and has a pretty amazing track record at writing copy that sells, a lot. Let’s just say his hobby is horse racing (owning, not betting).

What’s interesting is that this email really didn’t impress me. It wasn’t very well formatted and was pretty aggressive in it’s language – really challenging the reader to take action. But this guy is a wizard so I said what the heck. I took it, changed a few words to fit to our business and let ‘er fly.

Now, here is my rationalization on why it’s OK:

1. We don’t compete with Dan Kennedy guy so we’re not really hurting him.
2. He’ll never find out (OK – that one is lame)
3. We’ve attended a conference hosted by him where he has encouraged folks to apply his work.

So, I think he’d be OK with it. I’ve discussed this with a few other micro business owners and discovered that I was a plagiarism light-weight. People were borrowing whole marketing campaigns, verbatim from other’s who have had success. Again, in different markets so as to not be completely egregious.

This is really part of a broader principle that is key for micro business owners: success leaves tracks. When your small team is continually faced with a mountain of projects to get done to sell more – why reinvent the wheel. You can just look across the fence and see what people in related industries are doing to be successful. What are your neighbors doing:

• What does their web site look like?
• What is the order process for their product?
• What is the wording on their google ads?
• What suppliers do they use?
• What do their sales letters look like?
• How is their store laid out?
• etc…

Remember – this is not necessarily the same as gathering competitive intelligence. It’s about finding people in similar businesses and discovering what they’ve done to be successful. Then blatantly copying them.

Oh yeah – the plagiarized email I sent. It sold three times as much as the best one I’ve ever done from scratch.

C.

P. S. Post a comment or send me a note and I’ll forward you that email…

One point that really struck me this week is the opportunity we’ve been missing each time a prospect or customer has an interaction with us. Basically, the principle is that every time you have an opportunity to sell something – do it!

What specifically we’d been missing is a sales opportunity when you are thanking a prospect or customer for a sign-up or purchase. For example, when a customer that signs up for our newsletter, we automatically send them to a thank-you web page confirming the details. What we hadn’t been doing is using that opportunity to try to tell them about a purchase offer on that same purchase web page.

Another example is for events. We used an attendee info follow-up web page after someone registers for our Powerhouse Event. It was great for providing logistic details but what we should also be doing is offering a discount if they sign-up a colleague.

On our squeeze pages (the pages that someone goes to after clicking on an offer where we try to get them to sign-up or buy), we even added a “No Thanks” link just below our order button. The “No Thanks” sends them to another page where they get a free offer to join our newsletter. We’ve done that recently and had great conversion for folks in joining our newsletter where in the past they’d just be gone…

The long and short is that many folks forget to take advantage of a responsive customer – that is a customer demonstrating that they will respond to your offer. Why not give them an opportunity to be even more responsive when you thank them?

So instead of “Thank You and Come Again” try “Would you like fries with that shake?”.

C .

I’m always amazed at how little tweaks can make significant differences in open and click rates. One tweak that we’ve had a debate on was the use of borders in email communication. That is, whether to send emails with free-flow text (text-wrap taken care of by the email client) versus setting a specific width to the text.

The former tends to look more personal – something that we’d do if we were writing one-to-one. The later looks more professional but is more obviously a mass mailing. Colleen was leaning to the former as she is fantastic at adding personality to communication. I was leaning to the border version as I am more anal about look and feel. So we put it to the test!

We drafted two versions of a sales email: one had free flow HTML text and one had a nice border to constrain the width to about 650 pixels. The text itself, including all formatting (line spacing, para spacing, bolds, italic, etc…) was identical. We sent each one to 3500+ recipients and waited for the results.

The difference was dramatic. Click through rates – that is, the number of people that opened and clicked through to look at our web page where our product could be ordered – varyied significantly with one being 240% of the other.

And the winner? Borders rule. Keeping our email text within a border resulted in 140% more clicks to our web page than without.

I spent the next two hours redoing all our campaign emails to make sure they had borders. I also savoured one of the very few times where I’ve been right versus Colleen.

I typically reserve the “Geek” piece for technology issues but I have to expand on a math point. Every since my former CFO Dave Wagner corrected me, I’ve become a bit of a zealot on this point. It’s about calculating how much “more” something is versus something else.

In the click-through-rate calculations above, I stated that the rates with borders were 240% of those emails without. In other words, the number of click-throughs with borders, divided by the number of click-throughs without borders was equal to 2.4, or 240%.

This does not mean that the border-equipped emails performed 240% better or got 240% more clicks – it means that they were 240% of the non-border email clicks.

For a calculation of how much better or how many more there were, you need to take off 100%. So for example, if you have 100 apples and 200 oranges, you have 200% (200/100) as many oranges as you do have apples. But you only have 100% (200% – 100%) more oranges than apples.

Don’t feel bad if you’ve been doing this, it’s a common gotcha. Dave mentioned that even some CEOs have been known to do it…

C.

I was sending out an email from Colleen to the base, trying to upsell some members in one of our programs. It was a great offer and the email looked good. Colleen was out so I hit the send button.

To my horror, I found that in getting the email out, I had forgot to include the proper “from” address. Instead of Colleen’s, I had included mine. So, imagine this big blast going out with a very important (i.e. revenue generating) objective – all screwed up ’cause it arrives with a “from” address that no one has seen before. Not only did this risk the opportunity to generate some more dollars, it also risked annoying or confusing receipients to the point of being thrown into the “junk senders” abyss.

What did we do? Well, we tried to rescue the situation with a quick follow up email. It went exactly like this:

Oops! I’m sorry – I asked Chris to hit the send on this as I had to leave the office but he forgot to put in the correct “from” address. Guess who’s doing the dishes tonight?
Thanks for your understanding, Colleen.

That follow-up “Oops” email got over three times the response rate of our normal sales emails. We were surprised and definitely pleased. It reinforced an effect we’ve seen a few times now: the importance of personality.

The “oops” email we sent wasn’t pretty – in fact the whole thing was kinda fugly. But it was interesting, it was honest and highlighted that Colleen and I are real individuals. People like to buy from “real” people – people with personalities that they can have a relationship with.

And as a micro business, this is also a key tool against larger competitors. They are too big to have a personality. Who is the personality behind IBM, GM, Walmart, etc… Some try (think Wendy’s Dave and that Dyson vacuum guy) but the vast majority don’t. It’s pretty easy to match bigger competitors’ polish these days, but it’s hard for them to match your personality.

So, it’s important not to be ugly but it’s equally important not to sacrifice personality in your customer communication. Beautiful but boring is a killer. Highlighting your personality is what will build a relationship with your customers for on-going success.

Your challenge: Read your last few pieces of customer communication. Do they have personality?

C.

I’d like to think that I have a pretty realistic expectation about software quality and dealing with the inevitable bugs. Over the year we’ve been using it, the software has performed very well even though it has had its fair share of bugs. Most were treated with the right level of severity and handled promptly. That is, until last week.

The HTML editor in the product that is used to handle customer emails was upgraded and, unfortunately, a bunch of the formatting broke. Suddenly, emails that had a certain look had several elements of their style blow-up. Nice borders were gone. Fonts changed sizes. Spacing was changed.

Email is a major tool for us. It’s the way we deliver our newsletter, we use it to deliver offers to our base and it’s a key tool in many of our customer deliverables. So this was important.

As I’ve mentioned before, I am very anal about how we present ourselves to customers. I firmly believe that in 99% of cases, if you look bad or even inconsistent, you will sell less. What do you do look for when you make a buying decision?

Unfortunately, the folks at Infusion didn’t agree with me. The first line support person did look at the style impact to our company’s emails and then decided that the impact wasn’t severe enough to be rated “essential”. I recall from my Product Management days what that meant: maybe the next major release, if the development team has time on their hands (ya – that happens a lot), and Jupiter aligns with Mars…

To say that I was steamed was an understatement. Could you imagine if your printer came back with a customer mailing whose formating was screwed up and told you that it wasn’t a problem and to just deal with it? You’d go postal. So did I.

It was the angriest I’ve been at a vendor in the past year – mostly because they just didn’t get how important it is to look consistent and professional with your image. Not just for some abstract desire to create a particular brand – but because without that, you make less money.

C.