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.
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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 >

Here at Emailcenter we love football and have started to sponsor our local football team – Northampton Town FC.

Northampton have had a number of memorable results this season, including a victory over Liverpool in which they beat them on penalties in-front of the Kop and Tuesday night’s triumph over league two rivals Crewe Alexandra.  Northampton came from a goal down to romp to a 6-2 win.

This was the first time Northampton have scored six at their current ground and the sweet victory was enjoyed by a good crowd including a number of us from Emailcenter.

Another memorable Northampton result in which 6 goals featured, was the game against Manchester United in which George Best scored his famous double hat-trick.

Watch the highlights

Revolution, the champions for innovation in the digital marketing sector have Highly Commended Emailcenter for our expert use of email as a marketing channel.

This welcome commendation comes on the back of our endorsement from The Institute of Direct Marketing (IDM), who gave Emailcenter an award for being the email service provider that offers the “best use of email marketing”.

Emailcenter received the commendation from Revolution for the work conducted for toptable.com, the restaurant booking service. toptable.com tasked Emailcenter to create an email programme that would stop customers from defecting and turn them into loyal, regular users of the toptable.com website.  A year on from the start of the new eCRM programme bookings from defectors increased by 1,600%, proving that when customers are communicated with in a way that suits them, great results follow.

We took a few snaps of the event. Head on over to the facebook page to take a look.