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THIS
MONTH:
“The Most Important Email
Marketing Tactic of All”
 download pdf (51
kb)
THE SOFTWARE MARKETER'S TOOLKIT
Volume I, Issue 9, December 2006
Dear Software Marketer,
This month let’s get back to the “nitty gritty”.
As marketers, we often get hung up on the latest
“technique” designed to hook an audience. In
reality, however, direct marketing still comes down
to a few basics. One of these is: test, test, test!
Testing really delivers. In fact, a Jupiter
Research survey of 600 email marketers found that
marketers who test are nearly twice as likely to
attain conversion rates of 3 percent or better.
Despite this compelling argument in favor of
testing, only about 40 percent of marketers use this
easy and simple tactic.
What can you test?
According to a Marketing Sherpa survey of more
than 2,000 email marketers, the following are most
often tested:
- Landing pages, 74%
- Subject lines, 74%
- HTML vs. text, 70%
- Personalization with name, 63%
- Long vs. short copy, 31%
Other things that can be tested are your offer,
frequency, design, time of day the message is sent,
message layout, day of the week the message is sent
and the duration of time before follow-up.
How to Test
- Split your list: divide your list
into two or more groups and change one
characteristic for each group. Make sure that
you divide your list randomly so as not to
introduce any bias into your test.
- Conduct tests at the same time: time
is a variable. Sending test email A in the
morning and test email B in the afternoon can
yield very different results. So send test
emails out on the same day and as near to the
same time as possible.
- Make sure results are statistically
relevant: a good rule of thumb is at least
50-100 responses for each test before you can
draw conclusions from the results. Consult with
a statistician or market research expert, if
unsure. What’s a significant result? Experts say
that you should have at least a three times
larger result (e.g. average click-through rate
vs. test result) in order to be able to declare
a clear winner.
- Maintain a control group: a control
group is a random sample of your list that is
excluded from the change you are testing. The
purpose of maintaining such a group is to be
able to test the control group against the test
group.
You can make email campaign testing as simple or
as complicated (using complex statistics, analytics
and modeling) as you like. The point is to start
testing today because, as we know, even a small
“tweak” can dramatically change results. Perhaps the
real power of email is not how easy and cheap it is
to send, but rather its malleability: you can easily
evaluate and adapt your emails to improve results.
That's it
for this issue of "The Software Marketer's Toolkit".
If you have any questions, comments or an issue that
you'd like to see covered, please send me an email:
paul@paularinaga.com.
To your
software success,
Paul Arinaga
paul@paularinaga.com
www.paularinaga.com
Tel: +32 2 782 0207
Next month:
“Should web copy always be short?”
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