In our technology-driven world, email is one of the most used marketing tactics, simply because of the vast number of consumers to which it directly enables access. Even my 90 year old great-aunt has an email address and boy, does she love to hear about a bargain! Unfortunately, as a tactic, it’s also often one of the most misused. Being relegated to the ranks of a spammer is the most discussed pitfall. However, this is, in part, regulated by legislation (I’ve also read that spammers are deterred by garlic and the threat of a wooden stake). Most worrying is that there are just very few people out there who know how to use Email Marketing properly. Learning how to effectively use Email Marketing is challenging and one of the most oft neglected practices is testing, and more specifically split testing.

Test to find the best solution for your campaign. Image Credit: freedigitalphotos.net

In very basic terms, split testing involves the manipulation of variables in your newsletter and the sending of different versions to randomly selected segments of your database. The purpose is to ascertain which version performs better in terms of the goals that you have set for your campaign. The changes in performance can then be attributed to the manipulated variables. These tips focus on how and where you can implement split testing, with a view to ensuring that your conversion rate is maximised.

1.    Test the content of your mail

Copywriters and marketers usually feel like they know their audience. This informs the content that they write and include in newsletters. While the personas and profiles that we build for our readers may be accurate, you could still be surprised by what catches their attention or incites action. While it may not be practical to test completely different versions of your copy, there are elements of your content that it is beneficial to test. I would recommend testing different versions of your subject line as well as your call to action, as a starting point. The former plays a crucial role in determining whether your email is opened and the latter has direct bearing on your conversion rate.

2.    Test the creative elements

As an Email Marketer, it is easy to get stuck in a rut – you have a template that (while it may look like it stepped straight out of 2001) is in keeping with your brand. In any case, sticking with what you know is comfortable, like a pair of old socks. The problem with that approach is that for all you know, your readers’ opinion is that you have about as much creative pull as a damp squib. There’s no way of knowing whether or not that’s the case, without testing a variety of approaches. Our shiny new Email Marketing guru, Carmia Lureman recommends testing variations of your template to establish whether your readers prefer more images, more or less text, shorter call-outs, bolder buttons, or different variations of the block layout.

3.    Test different ways to use your database

Depending on the nature of your business and the size of your database, this is something worth considering. For the purposes of understanding your audience better, it is worth sending different versions of your newsletter to different segments of your database to gauge how they respond. It’s also worth splitting segments and sending them different versions, both of which are in some way tailored to their demographics and interests. If your database is not yet segmented and you have a broad audience, it may be worth using testing as a strategy for segmenting it more effectively. Sending a newsletter to your entire database, for example, and then looking for patterns in the KPIs and correlating this data against the information stored in your database could help you to inform its segmentation.

4.    Test your deployment strategy

There are several elements to your deployment strategy that can be tested quickly and easily with very little time-investment. While not strictly split testing, it is critical to ensure that your mailer is rendering properly on the full spectrum of email clients – it won’t do to have it come out looking like a shining example of your brand in Outlook and resembling gobbledegook in Gmail. Also important is the frequency with which you send emails and the day and time that you choose to send them. Decisions around this are brand specific, and while a healthy dose of common sense should form the basis of your choice, it’s worth having a few options and testing the variations to assess how/if this has an impact on your KPIs.

5.    Test your conversion tactics

While there are several elements of your newsletter that will have bearing on your conversion rate, there are always a few elements that are specifically designed to reinforce the goals that you have set for the newsletter. At the most basic level, these elements include landing pages and the calls to action that you use in your copy. While a call to action is usually short and sharp, the copy itself can often be varied to assess what version of the instruction is most likely to incite action. The placement, as well as the look and feel of the calls to action are also elements that should be tested. When it comes to landing pages, there are various best practices to which brands should always adhere. That said, they can be manipulated in much the same way as newsletters, through changing the look, the copy, the tone, the call to action and the structure. It’s advisable to send traffic from different segments of your database to alternative landing pages to test their efficacy.

Regardless of whether you’ve been sending your newsletter for 10 years or 10 minutes, there are almost definitely ways in which you can maximise your return on investment. Split testing of variables, and the careful analysis of the data that you derive, is a great starting point.

To learn more about planning, running and optimising your own Email Marketing campaign, sign up for Quirk’s new course.

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• Email SPAM - We all love to hate it