Our Blog

I love testing. I love finding out what works and what doesn't. It's amazing the things you learn by watching how your recipients interact with your content.

The problem? Not enough email marketers try it. Even within my own client base at Delivra, only a handful have chosen to run valuable test scenarios with actual takeaways. This just blows my mind: why are marketers so hesitant to start? It does take time and effort. You will need to be dedicated to your email marketing strategy to run valuable tests. But the rewards are worth it!

So what can you do to get those gears grinding? Below are 3 tips to get started:

1. Get brainstorming on improvements you can make to your email marketing content.
   Know what your competition is doing. Subscribe to other email lists and pay attention to what they're sending. Would aspects of their email newsletters be relevant to your own audience? What is it about your own content that is not living up to your competitor's? This is a great starting point to brainstorm on - what you could, or should, be changing in your emails.
    
2. Have a plan.
   It's not worth your time to blindly test different aspects of your content with no goal in mind. Know the different ways to test your content with multivariate or email AB split testing, and figure out what aspects of your content would benefit from a change.
   
   Let's say you're testing out 2 different subject lines: Don't simply split your list and send one subject line to each half. Where's the benefit in that? Instead, know why your subject lines are different and set up a test group beforehand. Say you send each subject line to 10% of your list. Give yourself enough time (I usually advise 3 days minimum) to review the email analytics and send the 'winning' subject line to the remaining 80%. Using this information, you'll see a much better response to your email campaigns.
    
3. Don't be afraid.
   Yes, there is a chance your recipients will not respond well to change within your content. But if you don't test it out, how will you know what you're sending now is the best content possible? No email marketer wants a negative result, but even knowing what doesn't work for your recipients is valuable information.

What have you learned about your audience through testing? If you haven't tried testing your content, why not? Comment and let us know!

The last entry for prepping your Holiday email campaign focuses on content and evaluating results. Choosing your content focus should be easy if you completed the tasks from week one and week two.

Test your subject lines and content. Can't decide on a subject line or where to place that "Buy Now" button? Email AB split testing takes the guess work out of it and shows you the results instead. Do not lean on just open or clickthrough numbers, instead keep the focus on conversion.

Keep your content simple. Just because you have lots of widgets does not mean they all need to be in the email. If you need to, refer back to your goals and ask yourself, does this addition to the content help meet our goals? If not, then take it out. Lastly, don't forget to add your social media share buttons. Your members are friend with other peope like them give them an easy way to share the info.

Use your results to make changes to the next mailing. Email is dynamic. Not happy with your results from your last mailing? Change something. Test. Repeat. While your goals should be pretty set by now, your roadmap should be etched in pencil and fine tumed throughout your campaign.

Benchmark and document for next year. Get a head start by writing out clear and detailed notes for next year. Document what worked, what didn't and ideas for trying next year. The longer you wait the more you will probably forget.

Best of luck on your holiday campaigns. Need some ideas for you campaign? Here are some ideas to get the ball rolling.

Holiday Email Campaign Ideas

• Dynamic Sequence- Create a drip campaign for certain interests. Maybe your recipients just want to see gift ideas for mom or a certain interest like running or reading or travel. Use dynamic content to send them one email with all of their choices rather than multiple emails.
• Themed Emails- 12 days of savings (make sure your members optin for this daily email). Need a special opt in? We can help. Contact us to learn more about profile and subscribe forms.
• Come back- Don't forget to set up shopping cart abandonment emails with an incentive to come back to complete the shopping process.
• Early Bird Campaign- Early shopping deals for "Black Friday" and "Cyber Monday" can stand out in the inbox if done well. Email graphic design has different rules than Web graphic design. Need some help figuring that out? Check out our design gallery for some ideas, thencontact us to learn more.
• Smart Phone Focus- Creating a special campaign for your smart phone users can increase sales and provide valuable information about where your members are reading your emails. Do some testing to make sure your in store check out process can scan the barcode from a smartphone. Need to know where to start? Check out our mobile design whitepaper.

Anyone using email for marketing needs to understand the power of testing content. Now there is a way to rate your acumen with Anne Holland's newsletter for whichtestwon.com.

In her newsletter, she shows two content samples and asks you to guess which one had the better response. This week a button with the words, 'Go to payment options' out performed by 86% a button with the word 'Submit'. Wow! Now this got my attention. 

Anne says, "A/B and multivariate testing can - on average - help lead generation marketers get ~40% more leads from their current Web traffic. E-commerce marketers can expect a ~20-25% sales lift if they do a round of tests. Yet, today fewer than 40% of marketers do any tests at all." 

Want tips on lifting your email marketing results? Sign up now at http://whichtestwon.com/.

The Delivra blog has shared the importance of testing before. In case you missed it, check out the blog posts below: 

• Testing 1...2...3: Delivra Dish on a new A/B Testing Resource
• Split Testing
• Refine your Email Marketing Tactics

However, if you've already read the blog posts about how important testing can be to your email campaign; then you want to read this free eBook from HubSpot. They have put together a great resource explaining the importance of testing, sharing real-life testing examples, and even walks you through some steps to get started. It is a great resource for a company that understands the importance of testing, but hasn't started. 

Email marketing is a great tool to help you reach your overall marketing and sales objectives. However, sometimes it's hard to know where to to start to make the leap from sending everything to everyone to really utilizing the targeted and dynamic power of email marketing. Here are some tips that should help you get started:

Define your Goals- This should not be confused with your email marketing statistics. Email open rates and clickthrough numbers are good indicators of how you are performing, but not necessarily end goals. Define what you want to accomplish. Is it to increase attendance at an event, raise more money or sell more of a widget? Define what the goal is and create an attainable (yet stretch) goal that is measurable and use email metrics as indicators of your success towards that goal.

Create your Baseline- Compare a series of mailings that have gone out to your audience over time to observe any trends.

Clean your List of Unengaged Members- If a member is not doing anything with your emails, then why continue to send to them? A re-engagement campaign pools all of your unengaged members into a segment so you can attempt to re-engage them. After you send your re-engagement emails and there is no activity, then change their member status so you are no longer sending to them.

Segment your Audience- If your audience is diverse and will likely respond differently to email content, time or day sent, then consider segmentation. For example, if this is a campaign to raise money, maybe define segments based on past donations. Another good option would be to segment based on age ranges or member engagement/previous activity.

Start Testing and Sending Email Campaigns- A/B Split testing is a way to test different pieces of content among your defined segments to see which piece of content gets the best results. The best way to utilize this is to test one or two variables at a time and evaluate which content gets the better results to send to the rest of your segment.

Evaluate and Make Changes-Review your baseline statistics to your new statistics coming in. The frequency of sending your emails to that audience will determine how long before you can really evaluate your results and start making changes to your content, sending frequency and subject lines.

Refining your email marketing tactics can take some time, but is well worth the effort. Need help? Contact us today with additional questions!

Rachel Rewerts | Account Management

It's been a while since we highlighted a new resource on Delivra Dish, so I thought I would share a resource that I like to follow:  the website is called WhichTestWon.  It is a site and blog created by Anne Holland (best known as creator of Marketing Sherpa.)  She now provides consulting services and hosts this website and blog to educate email marketers about the advantages of split testing.

The site, blog and email regularly cover different email tests where you can guess which test won, but you can also start to learn about trends that are occurring through these tests.  Not to mention learning a lot about email marketing testing in general.  Kudos to Anne and her team for creating such a wealth of information for marketers.

Check out the site and be sure to sign up for the email.

Carissa Newton | Marketing

If you are working in email marketing or are in charge of your company's email marketing campaign, then at some point you have probably been told  -- do what's best for your audience.

For example, you ask "When is the best time to send an email?" Some resources will offer a specific time, but most answer that by saying, "Well, it depends...on your audience and when they will most likely read your email."

Okay...then comes the task of figuring out what your audience wants.  Fortunately, Delivra offers split testing which is a tool that allows you to send different versions of the same email to test various things, such as:

• What kinds of subject lines appeal to my readers?
• What's the best time of day to send?
• How often should I send emails?
• Do my readers prefer to see more written text or images?
• How many links should I include?

Say for example, you send one email to a small group of your audience in the morning and you send the same exact message to a different small group of your audience in the evening.  Once both groups have received the email you notice that sending in the morning gets better results from your audience.  Therefore, you can send the message to the remaining part of your audience in the morning because it works best and you see the best results from sending then.

Conducting several different split tests in order to figure out the preferences of your audience will make your emails much more effective. To learn more about split testing or if you need help setting a test up, please contact Delivra today or check out a previous Delivra blog post about A-B Split Testing.

Below are other split testing articles for more information:

Email A-B Split Testing - If you are going to win, you have to play the game.

3 ways to Test Your Creative's Effectiveness

7 Steps to Improve Email Testing

Lavon Temple | Marketing

The dog days of summer usually signify really hot, lazy days where little progress is made.

Are you in the dog days of summer right now?

Feeling unmotivated and unmoved by anything?

Shake it off, get moving and give your email marketing plan a kick in the rear! Here are 5 things you can do with your email marketing efforts to beat the dog days of summer:

1. Welcome new subscribers- Set up a warm welcome message for new subscribers. Include what your emails are all about, allow them to select their preference of interest and frequency and maybe include a nice coupon code for them to use.

2. A/B split testing- Are you getting the open rates you want? How effective is that subject line you’ve been using for your newsletter? If things are slow right now and you have some extra time, pay a little extra attention to your analytics and test your content.

3. Segment- Think about your recipients. What are they really interested in? Don’t know? Do a survey and offer an incentive for filling it out. Find out frequency or interest or both. Then respect those preferences and plan your emails around what your recipients want. Watch your engagement soar.

4. Clean Up- Use the engagement segment to find out who is not doing anything with your emails.  Come up with a plan to either reach these people in a different way or remove them. Why send email to people who don’t read it anyway?

5. Start thinking about the holidays- This may be the last thing on your mind now…but if you sell or promote anything during the months of October-December and don’t have a plan yet…get one soon! Plan ahead and your life will be so much easier during the hustle and bustle of the holidays.  The plan can be simple: Define your goals. How many emails are you going to send? When are you going to send them? What are you promoting? Create the content and schedule the emails so you can breeze through the holidays.

That’s it folks, just a few ideas to spice up your email marketing this summer. Do something different today! Need more ideas? Give us a call at 317-915-9400. That’s what we’re here for.

Rachel Rewerts | Account Management

As a busy marketer and mom, I can tell you that it takes a lot to capture my attention away from whatever my focus may be at the time.  Last night after checking my personal email account, I quickly scanned a whole host of emails (50-60 at least.)  Some of which, like Land's End and Borders I had requested. Others...not so much. And then there are the host of emails I receive as a result of having two pre-teen daughters that love to shop. I guess this is their way of tipping Santa off on their wish lists and I guess I can't fault the sender if someone else opted me in.  However, there were many that had compelling enough subject lines or offers that I kept them on file for my holiday shopping.

As I quickly scanned the email subjects and sender addresses, I was quickly able to determine the keepers. Retailers and marketers-take note! With information, offers, and messages everywhere we look, it is critical to capture attention on that very first shot. Without a second thought, while on my phone, I simply deleted the emails that weren't compelling enough to capture my attention in that subject line.

As I was later doing some research, the action registered with me as to how very important a subject line can be. Having been an email marketer myself for over ten years now, I have certainly pored over my share of subject lines, email content and design. However, looking at it from the perspective of a recipient starved for time and searching for compelling-well, I can tell you I will even think twice about my subject lines.  Here are a few quick stats...

• 38 to 47 characters is the average number of characters that show up in the subject line of 57% of all U.S. email recipients' email programs. -Epsilon (2009)
• 25% of marketers rated Subject line tests "very effective". - MarketingSherpa "2009 Email Marketing Benchmark Guide" (Oct 2008)
• Emails with shorter subject lines significantly outperformed emails with longer subject lines. - MailerMailer (2008)
• Emails that had only the subject line personalized (12.4% Open Rate & 1.7% CTR) did worse than those with no personalization at all (13.5% Open Rate & 2.7% CTR). - MailerMailer (2008)

Want to capture attention? Here are a couple of quick tips...

1. Make it compelling
2. Keep it simple
3. Mention your offer without sounding spamish (Words like "free" or "sale", Characters like "!" or "$")
4. Keep it between 30-50 characters
5. Know your audience...and speak to them

Still torn on what to say? Try testing two subject line variations and then send your mailing to the winning subject line. A/B or Split Testing can help you do this in your emails. Marketers often test variations in design or copy, but many overlook the need to test subject lines. I guess you can think of it this way...

Poor Subject Line 1,000 emails sent=40-60% Ignored/Deleted

Good Subject Line 1,000 emails sent=20-30% Ignored/Deleted

Excellent Subject Line 1,000 emails sent=10-20% Ignored/Deleted

No science here, just pure experience in my own emails and seeing results for other campaigns.  Subject lines are probably the most important piece of copy you will ever write-think smart and make it count!

Carissa Newton | Marketing

I was invited down to Nashville, Tennessee last Sunday to watch my Colts play the Titans.  The Colts were a perfect 4-0 going into this game and the Titans were off to a horrible start at 0-4.   As we tailgated before the game, it was interesting to hear some of the comments from the local Titan fans.  Most comments revolved around the concept of the Colts were going to win big, it was just a matter of how big.  My response to them (in an effort to keep the peace…aka so they would continue to feed me) was, “That’s why we play the game, cause you never know how it will play out.”

How many times are business decisions made in a vacuum?  One or two people making final decisions based solely on what THEY think their message should look or sound like.  If you ask me, that seems like lots of hard work and added pressure.   A/B Split testing allows you to “play the game” and see what happens.

It gives you the ability to fine-tune your message over a period of time. Read this great piece from Marketing Experiments.  It discusses split testing for both e-mail and website conversion.  Just get started, don’t overcomplicate it!

Start with a 10/10/80 approach. Send e-mail A to 10% of your list and send e-mail B to a different 10% of your list.  Based on what metrics are most important to you, send whichever e-mail performed the best to the remaining 80%.  If you don’t like 10%, then simply pick test size …1000/1000/everyone else.

Learn one lesson at a time! You can’t test multiple elements at the same time.  Some potential elements to test could be;

• Subject line
• Graphic links vs. text links
• Video vs. photos
• Day of the week
• From line
• Call to action

Build upon your lessons-learned and fine tune your approach over the next 3-6 months.

Present your results/improvements gained through A/B split testing to your management team…I bet they get excited.

BTW – The Colts won 31 to 9.

Scott Cramer | Business Development & Sales