Exploring the World

B ecause of the immediacy of email data, testing should become an integral part of your ongoing email marketing efforts. Knowing what to test, how to test it and what to glean from the results will make your email initiatives perform to their fullest. Use this book as a guide to your email testing efforts. If you follow each of these steps within your email testing process, your campaigns will most likely be much more effective and rewarding. Use this checklist to explore all of the key areas of testing that will drive your success. Key Things to Remember When Testing • Testing in email is crucial • Start testing today—you don’t need to have the master plan • Establish a test protocol • Be creative and thorough in your testing areas • Test beyond the click and look at conversions • Test and review frequency and timing • Make sure you test accurately and reliably with lists • Always have one change action as a result of a test • Never sto

Email Metrics: Identifying Insights to Success T he basics of email metrics are not complex, but important. Email metrics can provide tremendous insight, but can potentially mislead efforts if not studied correctly. Remember that statistics can say anything. Make sure you understand what the data is showing. The Basics: Four Measurable Actions in an Email Message Opens Reporting opens would seem like a simple task. If someone opens your message, an “open” is recorded and counted. Not necessarily so. An “open” can really only be defined by how it is measured. A small, invisible image is placed on every message sent. That image references a specific source—the message it was placed in. When that image is accessed or downloaded, an open is recorded for that message. In terms of what that means to your open rate, there are some substantial if ’s. If the person viewing your message has images disabled, the open is not recorded. If the person breezed throu

Guidelines for Effective Email Creative T he growing complexity of today’s email market has created a deeper need to carefully consider the creative aspects of your email messages. While the need for quality and effective design has always existed from a pure marketing standpoint, challenges that are unique to the email space require a different look at creative from the perspective of accomplishing specific goals via email. This chapter introduces several critical parameters that should be given creative consideration, and provides tactics to optimize creative for maximum results. The Facts Research that analyzes how people view emails indicates marketers have three seconds to catch readers’ interest. That’s a limited amount of time to make an impression, inspire readers to keep reading, and get them to complete your desired action. Compound that data with additional research that suggests readers keep at most eight brands in their inbox at one time, a

Email Segmentation Strategies T he product or service that one customer can’t live without is one that another has no use for. The key selling point for one prospect is a weak point for another. Simply put, people care about what’s relevant to them, and don’t want to weed through what’s not. So why send irrelevant content? Send only information that matters to recipients, and watch your response rates rise. The key is to determine what content is relevant, and then divide your list into groups of people interested in the same information. Don’t know what that is? Ask them. We’ll discuss ideas on how to easily collect this information from your subscribers at the end of this chapter. Divide and Conquer Once you know what content your subscribers find relevant to them, divide your list into segments that make sense to your company or business model. You are probably already used to segmentation in your traditional marketing efforts, but many organizations