In my previous articles, I have strongly emphasized the idea of testing various aspects of your email campaigns to achieve better response rates. I've had my reasons! Testing can improve your results by a significant percentage. You could be getting lots more from your email marketing just by investing a little more time.
At ADBASE, we practice what we preach when it comes to testing: hardly a month goes by where we don't test something new to see how well it works. In this month's article, I will delve into the various aspects of testing, by sharing real-life testing results with you and discussing ways you can do this with your own marketing.
Key Factors to Successful Testing
If you want to get meaningful results from your testing, be careful with how, what and when you test. I wrote about some testing best practices in a previous article, Email Best Practices, so take some time to review this handy article if you missed it. I also covered the basic "how-to" of A/B testing - so do refresh your memory on this if need be.
You want to be mindful of when you test. We all know that the summer is a slow season in our industry, so this would not be an ideal time to test. There will be fewer buyers actually receiving your emails so any results you get won't represent an accurate sample.
And here is another thing to keep in mind about testing...every audience is different, so don't take our own results as canon. You will be sending your campaigns to a different audience and therefore won't get the same results.
Getting Your Emails Read: The Subject Line
The primary factor in getting your emails opened is your subject line, so you must use appealing language in order to motivate buyers into exploring your site...and then of course, hiring you!
At ADBASE's marketing department, whether we are marketing to prospective clients, or just sending out our newsletter, we know that getting our emails opened is the first step to making a sale or sharing our expertise. That's why I spend a significant amount of time crafting subject lines; in fact, this is one of the most important pieces of copy I write. So let's take a look at some of the testing we've done...I am sure the results will inspire you to incorporate these testing ideas into your own marketing efforts.
Test 1: Simple Subject Line Test
When ADBASE decided to incorporate testimonials into our promotional emails we decided
that we needed to learn what motivates our prospective clients to open our emails.
Would a success story shared by a peer get that email opened? Or maybe a simple
announcement would work best? I decided to find this out by testing two subject
lines. The first communicated how an existing subscriber was successful using our
product and the second spoke only about the promotion we were running. The results
were:
Test A: ADBASE Brings Jim Jordan Success, open rate: 25.46%
Test B: ADBASE-6000 Complimentary Emails, open rate: 26.85%...WINNER!
Clearly, Test Version B was a subject line that resonated with our prospective clients, as it performed over 1% better. Now, 1% may not seem significant to you, but consider the size of the list in question! In this particular case, the list size means that 169 people opened B over A. Imagine if you had an extra 169 people coming to your site! That's a lot of traffic you can convert to clients.
Another area of your email marketing I recommend you test, is the actual creative you are sending. [Note: For your assessment of these types of tests, you will be looking at your "click-through" statistics instead of your "open" rates, as these numbers tell you what caused a viewer to click on a particular image.]
Your image selection is obviously the key factor in driving buyers to your site, so you'll want to make sure that you are using the most impactful ones. Testing your image selection is also a good way to make sure that your own personal biases aren't winning out over good marketing decisions.
When you test, you will get data you can use to pick the images that inspire your buyers to visit your website, and overall this will make your marketing much more effective. You can also use testing to try out a couple of design or layout ideas to see which perform the best. For instance, you could test one image vs. three images or horizontal vs. vertical images. If you had two design ideas in mind, please do yourself a favor and don't rely on yourself to make the decision: let your desired clients do it for you!
We've done our own creative testing just recently, and we learned a lot from it.
Test 2: Email Layout Preferences
When we were thinking of what our next email campaign to prospective clients was going to look like, one of our main concerns was that our existing design was too long with too many distracting buttons to click. We had questions - lots of them! Yes, we had all of our key details "above the fold", (for more on this, read my article on Email Best Practices) but was that good enough? What if our entire email fit above the fold and had only one or two places to click? Would that have any impact on how many clicks occurred? Could we drive more traffic to our site by reducing the clickable options available? We decided to test a longer vs. a shorter version, and here are the results:
|
Version #1: Total Click-Throughs: 1.99% |
Version #2: Total Click-Throughs: 2.33% WINNER! |
|
|
We can determine from this test that the shorter, simpler version performed the best, so we took the results and incorporated the feedback into our latest email campaign design. The shorter style we now use has achieved what were previously our best results...except now we get them every time.
Your Call to Action: Drive Traffic to your Site
Other than the subject line, your "call to action" is the most important piece of copy you will craft for your emails. Just to make sure we are all on the same page, a call to action is creative that stimulates the action requested of a potential customer. This desired response could be a click-through to learn more about a product, or an incentive to purchase or to take a survey. A dynamic call to action will really have an effect on your sales, so you should take the time to craft - and test! - the words that inspire buyers to view your portfolio or to call you for a job. Not only that, but you should also consider where to place the call and whether you should go with text or a graphic.
We have tested our own calls to action, because we have a lot of content we want people to read, as well as other desired responses such as taking our surveys. Here are the results of a test we did when surveying expired clients. We tested a text vs. a graphic link to see which would encourage more people to take our survey.
|
Test #1: Total Click-Throughs: 12% |
Test #2: Total Click-Throughs: 13.9% WINNER! |
|
|
The results of this test are pretty clear...the version with a graphic call to action performed almost 2% better than a plain text link. (By now, you'll understand why we were excited by a 2% jump!)
I now use this information when crafting our emails: if I need someone to click on something important, I make a nice graphic. Test this for yourself and see what YOU can do to get buyers clicking.
If you would like a resource to help you with understanding and crafting calls to action, I highly recommend "Call to Action: Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results" by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg. It was assigned for a copywriting course I took a few years ago and I still find myself pulling it off the shelf when I need some ideas.
Conclusion
Your email marketing could be working harder for you...so go for it! With the investment of a small amount of time, you could be encouraging more buyers to view your work and hire you.
If you are a current ADBASE Emailer user, you can easily access all the stats you need to determine the success of your testing efforts. [I should also mention that a new version of Emailer is going to be available soon and will contain even greater functionality to aid in your testing efforts.]
Good luck, and let me know how it goes! Our Customer Support team is always available if you need some direction. Just send an email to marketing@adbase.com.