For years marketers have been limited to running A/B tests, but now Maxemail has brought MVT to the email marketing world it and opens up a whole new world of testing opportunities.

A/B Testing is not redundant though. There are still plenty of circumstances you might want to use it. Here is our quick guide:

1. You are only testing one thing – use an A/B test as this is not a Multivariate test!
2. You are testing huge changes to structure, content or essentially it is a completely different message – A/B test it
3. You don’t have much data – A/B tests might be the only option but try our calculator to make sure
4. You have lots of things you wish to test – MVT is the best route to keep the number of creatives manageable
5. You are testing an ongoing automated email – use an MVT test as it enables you to test more and a lot quicker
6. There won’t be much difference between results – use an A/B test as you want as much data as possible to ensure reliability of the result

Maxemail is the first email marketing solution to offer a fully featured MVT offering. Contact us if you want to learn how it can dramatically improve your email performance.

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.

There has been a lot of talk recently of data security, with the recent breaches at a couple of ESP’s, where millions of email addresses have been stolen by hackers. In both circumstances this has been because user logins have been compromised.

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.

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.