Principal Email Marketing Consultant at Emailcenter

Maxemail has had a powerful A/B Split Testing function for many years, that allows you to easily test anything about your email campaigns, to random samples of your lists. We have now enhanced this to make it even easier and quicker to use, allowing you to automate the picking of a winner for when you are not around to do so.

Here is a screenshot of the updated Split Testing screen:

Here you can see there are new icons along the top to open, copy, delete or create emails for this Split Test. The best way of adding different versions into the test, is to create one version you are happy with, copy it and change the one element you are testing in the other emails.

The other new icon in here is the “New Winner…” option. This opens the following dialogue box:

Simply select which metric Maxemail should decide the winning version upon. For example selecting “Total Unique Opens” will mean Maxemail chooses the winner that has the highest percentage of unique opens.

The next dropdown allows you to specify when the winner should be picked and sent to the remaining people on your list, which have not already received one of these emails:

When you do start using the updated feature, remember these key elements of best practice:

• Leave it long enough for results to become clear – even a subject line test might take 12 hours to be reliable

• Use a sample size of at least 2,500 people per test, ideally 5,000

• Change only one thing per test, otherwise you will have no idea what impact each element has had. This includes when you send the email, so make sure you send the tests at the same time

• Choose the right statistic to pick your winner from. While open rate might appear to be the best statistic for a subject line test, we often prefer to use click-thru rate. This is because if one subject line is directly related to the offer at the top of the email, this might generate more clicks, even if less people open it. After all these people are opening the email because of what is in the subject line.

The new ‘A/B Split Testing’ function will be available 9th May, 2011, as part of the V6 release.

The existing HTML editor in Maxemail is staying, but we are giving our users another option for producing their HTML email creative.

The video below demonstrates this, but here is a summary of the key benefits of this additional editing option:

• Editable Regions – certain areas of the template can be restricted so they cannot be changed, helping you maintain brand guidelines and ensure code is not broken.

• Content Library – populate the Content Snippets Library in Maxemail with content and then this is all available to insert into your email with a couple of clicks. You can even integrate your existing website or product databases, so every product or holiday you offer is available as an item for you to drop in. This dramatically reduces the build time on an email.

• Drag and Drop Interface – move content around with point and click, rather than the unreliable method of copying and pasting.

This might sound strange for an email company, but for certain activities we hate email. One such activity is the collecting of feedback from various sources, on what needs to be tweaked in an email campaign.

Endless chains of emails are sent between those giving feedback and the person making the changes. This person needs to make sure they do not miss any changes, while trying to decipher ambiguous change requests.

To address this problem, Emailcenter have introduced a tool to streamline the feedback process and improve communication. The video below demonstrates this, but here is a summary of the key features:

• Provide feedback by drawing on top of the email – remove ambiguity with visual annotations, so everyone is clear what the feedback means.
• Each comment is easily identifiable to the region and commenter, helpfully stored in one location, to make it easy to review all comments.
• Comments are archived for auditing purposes.

To understand how the Collaboration tool can make your email team more efficient, call the Support team on 01327 355871.

Last October we launched ‘Segment Reports’, a feature to allow you to analyse results in a single or series of emails broken down by segment of your database.

Now we have taken this further and launched ‘Cross-tab Reports.’

This allows you to take 2 separate types of segmentation and view email performance between them. For example you might have used Segment Reports to view performance between male and female customers, and created a second report for performance between age groups. However what differences do you see between males and females of different ages?

Here is how that report might look:

This shows we are getting good results for our older audience, but more problematic for younger groups, and in particular young males. Interestingly older males outperform females in the same age bracket. So what can we do to change if anything? How about:

• Look at the data collection process; are we getting the same quality of sign-up within these age groups to explain the difference in performance?
• Does the content appeal to all groups? If not, try utilising more targeted sends or tailored content using the Dynamic Content functions.

Using this analysis we can start to move away from the idea of each email having a target open and click rate, and move towards having targets for each specific segment of customers. As soon as we see it in this form, then it is easier to identify & measure strategies to improve smaller, specific segment performance, rather than the daunting question of how to improve the performance of the whole customer database.

To have a demo of the Cross-Tab & Segment Reports features, or have them enabled please get in touch with our Client Services team.

Maxemail offers Salesforce.com users a closed-loop system with data held in Salesforce being synchronised with Maxemail, and Maxemail reporting data stored against each contact record within Salesforce.

Synchronising lists between Salesforce & Maxemail

In Maxemail right click on the list you wish to add Salesforce data to and select ‘New Scheduled Imports’.

Here you will need to enter your Salesforce details & choose a report to import:

Using the Salesforce reports option makes it much easier to choose which customers to pull into your list.

Then you will need to map the fields from your Salesforce report with your fields in Maxemail:

Finally you need to define a schedule of how often you want the scheduled import to run:

Salesforce data will now be automatically imported into Maxemail without any manual intervention.

Viewing Email Activity against each contact record

All email activity is stored against each contact. Simply go to a Contacts page and you will see our tab listing all the emails they have been sent, and what they did with each email:

Click on this to get more detail on what they did with an email:

To get a detailed demonstration of Salesforce & Maxemail working together call your Account Manager on 01327 350921.