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Small
changes to your email can make a surprisingly large impact
on your results. Marketers who test their emails generally
stick to basics such as subject lines, the day of the week
or from name.
These
are fairly obvious things to test and will make a huge difference.
But what about minor changes to copy and layout? Do these
make any significant difference?
The
evidence suggests that they can. Lets take the case of JML
Direct. They ran an email campaign promoting their ‘Fresh
Air Globe’ product. The two splits they tested are shown
below. Can you spot the difference?
The
change made was to remove the top navigation bar which takes
users to specific product categories of the JML website. From
a first glance at the reports the email with the navigation
bar had a higher click-thru rate. Had this been what JML measured
the success on this would have been the creative used. However
JML were also using the ROI tracking function in Maxemail.
This provides the ability to track online orders from a specific
email campaign. The email without the navigation bar generated
twice the number of purchases.
The
theory behind this is that recipients clicking on the navigation
bar in the first email were drifting around the website rather
than being directed through the specific landing pages on
the product being promoted.
Looking
at where the click-thru’s occurred in the email further
backs this up. The vast majority of clicks were on the navigation
bar and if you actually deducted these from the click-thru
total the click-thru rate would actually be less than the
email without the navigation header.
The
moral of this story is not that navigation bars at the top
of the email are a bad thing but that these seemingly insignificant
changes can have a huge impact on the level of success in
your email marketing campaign.
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