Email marketing strategy: testing.

When you define an email marketing strategy, you have to consider “testing” into your planning.  Preferences change very often and one email piece that might have proven effective under certain circumstances, might not be effective when things change so be prepared to test. Some of the things you should test are:

• Test different subject lines:  subject line, together with the sender, is the first thing a recipient sees, so you should test the same piece, to the same group, with different subject lines and find out which performs better. Also, test different subject lines for different target groups and segments.
• Landing page.- you should apply all known best practices for landing page testing.
• Copy.- similar to subject lines, you should test title, subtitle, copy and call to action. Obviously your copy should be customized for the different target groups and segments.
• Offer.- try sending the same piece with different offers of with the same offer stated in different manners. (A 50% discount Vs a 2×1 offer for example)
•  Time and frequency.- there  is a lot of debate around the best days and times to send an email piece but the reality is that with so many studies and results around, you will be better off doing your own testing (we will cover times and days in another blog post during this week).  Frequency for timed emails is also something to be tested, emails tested a various intervals can produce different results.
• Personalizing emails .- another tactic that seems to be working is to personalize the sender so the email appear to be sent by a sales rep or by a customer service VP or by a product manager, etc.
• Capture form .- keep in mind that the more fields in the form, the higher the friction so try to keep it simple. Nevertheless, if the goal of our campaigns to capture enough data, then be sure to offer something very attractive to the people that sign in so they will not abandon the form if they see more than 4 fields.

Good luck!

Later today we will post another topic: Email marketing strategy: checkup on your opt‐in processes. To be on top of frequent email marketing info, follo @3emailmarketing in Twitter.