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.

Recently our Principal Email Marketing Consultant – Sean Duffy, was interviewed by Ciaran from Target Internet on his views on all things Email Marketing.

Listen to a podcast of the Interview for some useful insights into email marketing topics ranging from customer relationship strategies and design tips all the way through to email analytics, the recent data breaches effecting the industry and the what the future may hold for email marketing.

You can view this and other digital marketing podcasts at www.targetinternet.com

If you would like to discuss any of the topics covered in this podcast please get in touch.

To celebrate the start of the new football season, we have created a league of the marketing emails sent by football clubs from the Barclays Premier League.

Read on to see if your team are going to make it into Europe, settle for mid table mediocrity or get relegated.
Read More

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.

The newest member of the Emailcenter team (Simon) talks about the main issues to consider when trying to get your marketing emails to render correctly in Outlook 2007.