So you have an amazing MVT tool, now to test your email campaigns – what should you start with? The general rule of thumb is:

• Start with your emails aimed at conversion, re-activation or cross-selling – small changes here will make a big difference, plus the results are more repeatable than newsletters, where each edition will have different content, lessening the reliability and usefulness of some results.

• Think about the objective of the email – how can your tests support this? Is your newsletter about engagement? Then maybe your tests should be around how we get people to read more articles. If your email has a simple single action, like ‘Buy this product’ or ‘Review this purchase’ or ‘Come back and get a special discount’, then your tests should be aimed at maximising this, which usually means evaluating your call-to-actions and key messaging.

Once you have established which emails to test and the objectives for each then here are the key areas to look at:

Buttons & Call-to-actions
Simply, how can you make them stand out more? Should you make them orange? If you have a text call to action, have you tried reversing the text so it is perhaps white text on an orange background? Have you tried different text – how can you improve ‘click here’ – does ‘Buy Now’ work better?

Subject Lines
Subject lines are traditionally the first thing tested in an A/B test programme. However if you have done this you will know that the subject line that fits with the main content at the top of the email, will perform best. So when performing a multivariate test, try testing a number of subject lines, to see which one performs best with different combinations of content within the body of the email. You could find one combination outperforms the rest, even if when measured individually it is not the best performing subject line.

Remove clutter
If you have a single specific goal for your email, any additional clutter will distract reader and therefore should be removed. Try taking things out to see what happens, such as the pre-header and link to the online version, any menus in the header to sections of your website, or even any in-line links in text. If you only want someone to click on one link, test not having other distracting content and you should see an improvement.

Headlines
The headline is possibly the first thing someone will digest when reading your email. Try different text here, as it can make as big of a difference as subject line to overall performance.

Credentials
Why should your customers trust you or what you claim? Does adding logos of the likes of Verisign help persuade people your website is secure? Does adding customer testimonials or review scores improve click-thru rate on product offers?

Product Detail
How much is too much? Should you just have product name, image and price or should you add further information, and if so how much before the added clutter hinders the click-rate?

Product Imagery
Is it worth investing in extra photography, perhaps showing the product you are offering in action against the single box shot offered by the manufacturer?

Offer
If you have a special offer campaign what incentive works best? Does 10% off work better than Free Delivery?

These ideas are just examples of what can be done. If you have an idea of what might impact performance then create an MVT or A/B test.

Maxemail has become the first email solution to have a true Multivariate Testing (MVT) option built in, but why have we added it? Essentially we have added it as it gives marketers much greater power than simple A/B testing.

Here is why MVT Rocks compared to A/B testing, on email marketing campaigns:

Quicker to test
A/B Tests can only handle one change at a time – any more than this and you have no idea what caused the change in performance, and by how much. Therefore it can take forever to test everything you want to test. However with MVT you can keep adding new tests as you think of them, and automatically work out the best performing combination, cutting test time from months to maybe a day.

Easier to identify change between combinations
MVT not only identifies the best variations, but also the best performing combinations. Indeed just because you have identified one call-to-action works better than another, it might not actually perform best against other hero images or headlines you want to test.

Easier to manage
Each A/B test is a different creative, and therefore a different email. While most ESP’s still make this fairly easy to manage, it is still clunkier and less scalable than MVT where more than a handful of test variants are wanted.

A/B Testing still exists though, as it has its place. Where you are perhaps testing fundamental structual changes to a template, or only testing one thing, then A/B testing works fine. However if you are serious about your email testing strategy, then MVT is the only credible option.

Emailcenter are pleased to announce the launch of the Email Industry’s first Integrated Multivariate Testing tool for email.

While ESPs have offered A/B testing functions within their platforms, and some 3rd party solutions are available, this is the first time a full scale MVT solution has been built within an ESP’s offering.

MVT takes A/B testing to a new level by allowing marketers to test more than one thing within their campaign, without losing validity of the results. Now marketers can implement all of their desired testing in much shorter periods of time as a result.

Initial pilots of the tool by Maxemail users have seen click rates improved by as much as 49% versus the original control message. Typically customers are experimenting with button colours, call-to-actions, hero imagery and headlines.

Setup of an MVT email is easy. Simply create the content variants, tag each one as to what part of the email it should appear, and insert the MVT tokens into the relevant sections of your email. Maxemail then calculates all of the combinations between variants, and sends each to equal random samples of your list. Reporting is automatically available against MVT emails, showing both every combination of variants (full factorial) or the best performing variants without taking into account the combination of variants (Taguchi).

Offering both analysis options allows marketers with even the smaller data sizes to start taking advantage of MVT. Indeed a common myth is you need far more data with an MVT than an A/B test to make it worthwhile, however where trying to improve clicks the Emailcenter MVT Calculator shows less data is needed than traditionally thought.

Customers interested in enabling MVT to their account should contact their Account Manager in the first instance.

Here at Emailcenter we take the issue of data security very seriously. Our clients are hosting their valuable customer databases with us and they expect our security to be of the highest standard.

In a recent blog post “Data security check-list” we highlighted a number of safeguards we have implemented. Another major tool in the fight against hackers is our new Maxemail Security Key. The Maxemail Security key is a USB key with a button on it, which users are prompted to press when logging in. This sends a unique, secure code and completes the login. A new code is generated each time the button is pressed for extra security.

Download our data security whitepaper here: 3 Threats to the Security of Your Email Marketing Database

One of the basic rules of data protection is, only give access to those that need it. Reducing the amount of people that can access the data reduces the amount of people who can lose their logins to hackers.

This is one of the benefits of the ‘Enhanced User Permissions’ available in Maxemail V6. Users have always been able to specify what areas of Maxemail are available as per the screen below, but if someone needed access to a single list, they would need access to all lists.

Now for each user, you can assign them to a group. Then against each folder in Maxemail, you can define which groups can read or write in that folder. So you could set a group of users to be able to view all of your newsletters but not actually create any.

This applies to everything you store in Maxemail – lists, emails, reports, segments, templates, forms or dynamic content – choose which users have access to which folders in each of these areas.

Another enhancement is aimed at our customers who have multiple customer spaces. Previously users could either see just one or all customer spaces, but now it is possible to choose which ones they have access to:

For more information on configuring user access rights and folder permissions call our support team on 01327 355871.