When we all first started sending email marketing campaigns, I’m sure we will all agree that we were amazed at the amount of reporting data available to us. We could see in real-time who opened, what they clicked on, and later, what they bought and for how much.

Yet once you have got over the initial excitement and try and use these reports to improve your email marketing the buzz dies down as they don’t provide any insight into what to do next.

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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.

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.

Emailcenter won the Silver standard award at the Travel Marketing Awards last night. We received this award for the innovative work we have done for environmentally friendly adventure holiday company – ResponsibleTravel.com.

This award is the latest in a long list of reasons why companies are turning to Emailcenter to deliver highly innovative and targeted email marketing campaigns to their customers.

By using behavioural data captured from their website, ResponsibleTravel.com were able to target their customers with highly relevant holiday emails, resulting in a 254% increase in conversions of prospects.

Read the ResponsibleTravel.com case study.

To discuss how behavioural targeting can help your email marketing get in touch >

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.