If you were given the opportunity to try two things at the same time to see which one would give you the most benefits for the least work, would you take the opportunity? Of course you’d do it!

Think about this. What if whenever you walked up to a girl, you could try a couple different pick-up lines at the same time (and without the girl knowing), to see which line would get her attention? You’d exploit your unfair advantage, I’m sure.

Split testing = An unfair corner on the market

Think about your email campaigns. Whenever you work to compose and send one, you’re pretty much taking a guess each time, hoping that all the hours and effort you put into shaping the most grabbing subject line, the perfect offer, the best body copy and the most motivational call-to-action will make them open it and react. And then, that amazing promotional graphic you creatively designed. You hope your subscribers will not be able to resist that!

Here’s an idea! Why not take the chance element out of it and be certain next time?

When you split test your email campaigns, all you do is copy the original email, change any part (one or multiple), schedule the split test delivery and then sit back and watch the magic happen! Split testing offers a fast way to optimize email marketing campaigns. If you use split testing, you’ll be able to try out a couple versions of your message on a few subscribers, see which one performs better, and then use the better message for the rest of the subscribers.

For your next campaign, you can use the superior message as a foundation. You can then keep testing more elements, improving your email campaigns with each test. What’s the best thing about this? It’s amazingly easy! In fact, it’s so easy I don’t know why you don’t split test EVERY campaign! And think about it: Could you even try to do split testing with a newspaper ad or print campaign?

An easy example

Let’s imagine I’m a restaurant sending out an offer to my clientele to come in and eat on slow Wednesday evenings. Usually your resources (ad agency, in-house, etc.) are pretty much guessing at what offer is going to motivate customers to come into the restaurant. And you pay them for the guessing. The offer seems great. There’s a big enough, bold enough call-to-action. Hey, let’s try it. You press the send button. While you obtain okay open rates, you don’t think you did quite as well as you could have.

Using split testing, you are able to experiment with some variations such as:

* Sender/Envelope Info
* Subject lines
* Calls-to-action
* Images
* Body Copy
* Testimonials
* Personalization
* Message layout/design
* And more…

And with those options guess what you can do? You can get these results:

* Increase Open rates
* Increase Requests for more information
* Increase Click-thrus
* Increase Visits
* Increase Calls
* Increase your knowledge of what works and what doesn’t

Could be that a two-for-one offer isn’t as effective as free apps. How could you have known?

Do you have enough to think about now? Are you willing to give it a try for the next email campaign you send? If you’re an eConnect Email customer, we’re always here to help you! Contact your account manager for a few ideas and help you get started with split testing.

Good luck!

I can hear some of you groaning now. Testing, you say? Please, don’t talk to me about testing. I know. The very thought of testing is enough to send some of you into hibernation for the winter. But before you settle down for a long winter’s nap, let’s take a look at how testing can benefit your business.

• Testing for Increased Sales

Testing your email campaigns can increase your sales by as much as 25%, according to www.whichtestwon.com. Especially during the holiday season, 25% is nothing to be sneezed at. And with the natural surge of email in the weeks leading up to Christmas, it’s the perfect time to start implementing a testing program as part of your email marketing strategy.

• Testing Pinpoints Successes and Failures

Okay, you say. Testing can increase sales. How? By pinpointing the specific elements of any given email that cause measurable changes in user behavior, testing can help you design messages that encourage subscriber response. For instance, does Subject Line A or Subject Line B result in more opens? Only testing will tell. Does blue or red work best for the call to action button? Should you use a button at all? Maybe linked text will work better. There’s no way to know apart from testing. A rigorous program of testing enables you to discard what doesn’t work, showcase what does, and build a customized email strategy that best appeals to your target audience.

• Testing the Right Things

Yes, you can test the font of the link to your privacy policy at the bottom of the email, but it probably won’t result in measurable changes. What, then, should be your focus as you seek to build a successful email campaign? Let’s take a look at five elements you can use to kickstart your testing program:

1. Subject Line—Test various wordings and appeals to make your subject line stand out from the crowd.
2. Call to Action—Wording, font, button color, placement, size—the possibilities are endless when it comes to designing the perfect call to action.
3. Offer—Which offers will most appeal to your target audience?
4. Graphics—Size, subject matter, and placement of graphics can all influence subscriber response. Find out what works best by testing your options.
5. Copy—Test wording, format, appeals, and style in order to choose the copy most likely to persuade.

eConnect Email can help you design reliable split tests to determine which elements appeal most to your target audience. Take advantage of our customizable templates, design integration, and image management as you design each test, and make your holiday up to 25% merrier this year.

Is your email marketing program in need of a redesign? If you haven’t evaluated your marketing practices since last year, then it’s time to ask some pertinent questions about your marketing objectives and strategy. Consider these best practices and start your new year off on the right foot.

1.     Craft Your Welcome Letter as a Marketing Email

Don’t settle for a run-of-the-mill boring welcome letter. Instead, use it as an opportunity to start building a solid relationship with your subscribers.  Invite your subscribers to connect with you via social media and include links to additional content about your products/ services. Need help?  We’d be happy to give you some pointers or help you craft and design an effective welcome email.

2.     Use Emails to Follow Up on Cart Abandonment

Cart abandonment rates are astonishingly high, but you can draw some of that lost business back by using emails to follow-up with customers who bailed out before buying. Remind them of their selections and use the email to cross-sell or up-sell. You can also give them the opportunity to leave feedback or offer an incentive for them to come back and complete the purchase.

3.     Use Split Tests to Achieve Higher Open and Click Rates

If you don’t test various options, then you’re essentially guessing what will entice readers.  Split Testing allows you to choose the most effective subject line, call to action, images, and copy for every email campaign.

4.     Give your Subscribers Options

Give your readers the chance to unsubscribe, modify details, or change email preferences without jumping through hoops. Making this process easy leaves a sweet taste in their mouth even if they choose not to remain on your mailing list.  With eConnect Email’s list management options, you can stay on top of subscriber information and make sure your emails reach their intended destinations.

5.     Integrate Social Media with Your Email Campaign

With the rise of social media you’ll want to make sure you adapt your email campaign to the new landscape. You can increase your overall reach by giving your subscribers the opportunity to share your campaign on the various social networking websites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.).

As you rethink your email marketing initiative, take advantage of the tools and solutions available with eConnect Email in order to further engage and interact with your subscribers.  If you have any questions or there is ever anything we can do to help you out let us know!

The year 2010 brought huge changes in the way consumers interact with companies online. As social media opened the door for increased interaction between businesses and their customers, marketing efforts were often left scrambling to keep up with the changing demands of the new marketing landscape. As we head into 2011, the lessons we learned in 2010 can point us in the right direction and keep us on the right track.

• Customer expectations constantly change.

Because customers can now interact in real time with businesses, they expect faster responses to their concerns and requests. For your email marketing campaigns, this means staying on top of customer interests and providing real-time value. eConnect Email can help you achieve these goals through email automation by the implementation of email triggers and auto-responders.

• Social media is here to stay.

While no one knows what the next big “thing” in social media will be, we do know that social media as a technology is not going anywhere anytime soon. While that idea can be intimidating to some businesses, social media actually provides excellent opportunities to grow both your email marketing list and also engage your social media followers online.  This being said, we have embraced social media and have actually integrated with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Buzz.  Click here for information about the integration of social media with eConnect Email.

• Customers expect stellar service.

While customer service has always been a top priority for successful businesses, customers now expect even greater attention to be paid to their needs due to increased interaction online. This means staying on top of subscriber’s preferences and making sure each email arrives at its intended destination.   eConnect Email ensures that your mailing lists stay up to date by using list cleansing, suppression lists, list segmentation as well as giving your subscribers the ability to manage their mailing list subscriptions through the online preference center.

• What works for someone else may not work for you.

It’s easy to put together a list of best practices and slap them up on a website for others to emulate, but building a truly successful email marketing program takes a little more planning and insight. The truth is that what works for one company may not work for another, so it’s vital that you incorporate testing into your email marketing strategy. That’s why I would recommend that you A/B Split Test each and every email campaign.  Split Testing will help ensure that you deliver only the most effective messages to your audience.

With 2010 in the past, businesses will need to take the lessons learned over the past twelve months and build on them to create a strategy that will effectively meet the challenges of 2011. eConnect Email stands ready to help you accomplish this goal with a vast array of tools and features that will help keep your email marketing strategy on the cutting edge.  If you have any questions about the capabilities of our application we’d love to hear from you!

Are you tired of mediocre open rates from your email campaigns? What if you could eliminate the frustration of guessing at subject lines and content that will gain the attention of your subscribers? Imagine getting great results the first time you send out an email. When it comes to email marketing split testing is a no brainer.  Using this powerful tool, you can put your marketing strategies in overdrive.

Split testing sounds like a complicated procedure, but it is really quite simple to understand. The first step is taking a look at the information you are seeking to convey to your subscribers. You take that information and create two similar emails that are almost (but not quite) identical. Perhaps you slightly change the subject heading or alter the phrasing of a campaign slogan. The split comes when you send the two different versions of the email to a small sampling of your mailing list to see which campaign performs the best. Once you know which email receives the most favorable response you send the best performing campaign out to the remaining recipients.

The novelty of split testing is that you can take the results from your tests and evaluate which strategies were the most effective.  Let’s say you varied your two emails by including a graphic in one that you did not include in the other. If the email including the graphic receives the most favorable results then you know that your readers respond to the graphic. You can then go on to include more graphic elements in future emails.

The more you split test, the more effective your email marketing will be. Don’t stop with just one test. Once you receive the results of the first one, immediately begin a new test that builds on the information you gathered. The more you learn about your subscribers’ tastes, the more your marketing will reflect the strategies that cater to them. This will increase traffic and encourage more effective marketing.

Today, split testing is being used in more ways than just email marketing. It is so effective that now people use it in website design and online advertising, as well. The usefulness of being able to test out different strategies before fully launching a campaign is invaluable.  Don’t be left behind, eConnect Email has built split testing into our application so make use of it.

How do you go about split testing within eConnect Email 3.0?

1)    First create the two variations of your email campaign which you would like to test

2)    Now select “Create Split Test” from the “Email Campaigns” tab

3)    Give you Split Test a name

4)    Choose the two versions of the emails campaigns to use for testing

5)    Select how a winner is chosen

6)    Finally, select what kind of test to run

7)    Now sit back, kick your feet up and let technology work for you.

Questions?  Give us a call, we’re here to help!

I wish there was more we could do to get email marketers to use the tools available to them to help increase reader response. So much effort is put into making campaigns look beautiful but often the technology to help increase reader statistics are never used. So, on your next campaign, please consider the following tools to help make your emails a success.

1. Split Testing

This one is a no-brainer.  How awesome would it be to be able to test which headlines or titles would be most successful before sending a newspaper or book to print?  I guarantee if an author could do this he would because more purchases equal dollars in his pocket.  With email marking, this is easy and it’s called split testing. With split-testing, any reputable email platform will allow you stage a few options, hit send and let the system pick the winner based on the criteria you choose (opens and click-thru’s) and then delivers the remainder of your campaign to the winner. We’ve seen open rates at 20% spike to 45% and click-thru rates jump from 4% to over 10%, just by trying two different subject lines.

Benefit? Find out quickly what works and get a better response rate.

2 . List Segmenting

OK- another no brainer: Targeted emails are obviously more well received so let’s stop batching and blasting those emails to the entire mailing list and take a minute to segment that list.  By importing contacts into a single list with relevant fields of data for your market you can then search for specific criteria within that one list.  For instance if you would like to send an email to everyone on your list with a 92009 zip code you can, or even what products or services a group purchased previously and so on.

Benefit? Cleaner management of data, more targeted mailings, greater response rates.

3. Triggered Mailings/Auto-responders

Let your email marketing go to work for you…and forget about it.  It just takes a little time to set up a series of timed emails but once it’s done you can put your feet up and know that your customers are being informed or reminded of your services automatically.  Scenario: Someone visits your web site and requests a white paper or a trial of your software or perhaps they made a purchase.  Connect that information to your platform and stage mailings to “auto” deploy based on the criteria you set.

Benefit? Let technology go to work for you and keep the right (timed) communication in front of your audience.  Multiple touches and BAM!  They take action!

4. Personalization

This is email marketing 101, but do it in a creative fashion.  Think outside the box and work with the data you know about your subscribers.  Why not personalize an email with some details you know that wouldn’t be what you’d typically store in an email database.  Here’s one, “Hi Brett – we feel horrible.  Your birthday was yesterday and we were late.”  How clever.  Now, I may know intuitively you automated this somehow, but you cleverly spin it to sound human (we made an error!).  Have a purchase history on your customers stored somewhere?  Why not use that to merge the last product purchased or the last interaction with you.

Benefit? Email is all about relevancy.  You must know who your prospects and customers are, right?  Why not demonstrate that?  You’ll keep them engaged MUCH longer.

5. Social Follow & Social Sharing

At this point, if you are not working your email marketing and social networking together, you’re probably living under a rock.  You have to go where the eyeballs are and email/social is a powerful one-two punch.  If you have a Twitter feed or a Facebook fan page like us, you need icons in your emails to not only prompt your customers to follow you, but also to share the content inside your emails with their networks.  Forward to a friend is still a standard and many subscribers will use this, but the NEW forward is really the share feature.  It allows folks to connect this with their personal and professional networks quickly and easily and may garner you some new subscribers.

Benefit? Everyone knows hundreds, sometimes thousands of people you or I don’t. Why not tap that? Let them remarket on your behalf.

So there you have it.  These things are within your grasp today, and as always, the eConnect Email marketing platform lets you set these things up quite easily.  If you need help setting any of these things up in your account, as always, you can reach out to us at anytime.