One of the great things about email marketing as you can always look to improve performance by analysis of campaign statistics. This article focuses on testing your emails to find out which specific variables give the best performance for your campaigns.

What to test

Subject line
The subject line influences whether you email gets opened. Try different types of subject lines including up-front offers such as ‘28” Widescreen TV only £295’ and generic subject lines such as ‘Email Marketing Newsletter’. You should also consider testing personalisation to see what works best for your email campaigns.

From address
There are three types of ‘From’ names to use. These are generic company names, the name of the newsletter or the name of a person in your organisation.

Salutation
Test how you greet the recipient. Is it better to use the first name of the recipient or remain formal? This can be identified by looking at the unsubscribe rate and specific click-thru’s in both the emails.

Call-to-actions
The format, style and position of the call-to-actions can affect the click-thru rate.

Products and offers
Clearly different offers will appeal to different people. In an ideal world you would know which offer would be best for each and every one of your customers. However that data is not always held so experiment with your offers to see which have the broadest appeal.

Segmentation and personalisation
You might have a wide range of products you would like to feature. Decide how which personalisation strategies you want to test (e.g. behavioural, demographic, geographic) to understand which works best.

Frequency
How many times you send to your customers will affect the response rate. Try splitting your list into three and send monthly to one segment, fortnightly to another and weekly to the last segment over a period of three months to see the difference in response rates.

Timing
It is universally accepted that the timing of the email is an important factor in getting a good response. You will often hear people quote certain days of the week and times when they insist an email should be sent – usually Tuesday through Thursday at 10am. However each email is different and will work best at different times. A light hearted B2B newsletter will probably work best on a Friday afternoon when people are at their desks just waiting for 5pm while a corporate newsletter will not. You should also not consider the timing of the campaign to be rigid if your campaign is linked to events in the outside world such as many during Euro 2004 were.

Content
The content of your newsletter could contain anything from industry news, new product information, white papers, competitions, surveys, special offers or anything else you can think of. Which of these or which combination of content can be judged by looking at click-thru and open rates over time to see if the content is still interesting the various segments.

Landing pages
These are often overlooked in the testing process. They are vital for converting those recipients that have clicked on a link into making a purchase, completing a registration form or requesting more information.