Are You Really Testing Your Email Campaigns?

Ask any online marketing professional whether they test and measure their email campaigns and they will quickly respond, "You bet!"  However, in reality, most online marketing professionals are doing a poor job of testing, measuring and optimizing their email campaigns.

Wired Magazine recently did a great piece on how web companies are using A/B testing tools to measure the effectiveness of their websites and make thousands of small tweaks to optimize them for various metrics.  However, many marketers forget to bring this same mentality to email marketing.  Let's face it - email marketing takes a lot of work.  You have to get emails out on a tight schedule, and it is always a battle to get the content done in time.  Segmenting your list and making sure you are sending the right content to the right list takes a lot of work.  I have a whole folder of emails that were major screw-ups from big-time Internet companies. These are cases where companies sent the wrong message to the wrong customers, often causing dire results like crashing their site or their call center.  As a result, as a profession we sometimes run out of steam to really tweak and optimize our emails.

Here is a quick test you can take to see if you are doing a good job measuring and optimizing your email campaigns:

• Do you A/B test subject lines on your newsletters to optimize open rates?  (OK, this is an easy one - most folks will answer yes.)
• Do you measure open rates by day and time?  (This is old news.)
• Do you A/B test subject lines on your transactional emails?
• Do you do A/B tests on content in both your transactional emails and newsletters to compare click through rates of different variations?  For example, do you change up images in your emails or key text sections to compare results?  (Now we are getting into the harder stuff that most people forget to do.)
• Do you segment your welcome emails to test the long term revenue impact of different variations of the welcome emails?  Do you measure the long term revenue impact of one welcome email vs. a series of welcome emails?

The last couple of questions require fairly sophisticated email and segmentation tools, but can really drive tremendous value to the business if you can unlock what works for your customers.  Don't let the day-to-day burden of sending emails bog you down to the point where you miss the strategic opportunities that come from doing more sophisticated tests and optimizations.