TESTING - Anatomy of an Email Inbox - Nov 8, 2016

It is finally here - voting day!  I'm sure most of us are glad to be at this point and moving onward, whatever that brings.

How does that relate to our topic of testing?  It is early in the day, but I took a look at my inbox this morning to see if anyone was leveraging the day and in fact some are.  Of 54 emails that I received since midnight, 6 had some element of the election theme in them:

Builders Designs subject line:  "The Polls are Open for cyber Monday!"
Fandango:  "Election Day, Movie Style"
IAB Smart Brief:  "How tech companies are getting involved on Election Day."
Groupon:  "Elect to save on Tech, Home and More Doorbusters."
World Market:  "We voted. And the winners are..."
Kohls:  "Uniting all sides behind our $10 off."

When we think of testing, often subject lines are easy to test and can have dramatic impact and the ESPs do a good job generally of facilitating this.  So, first question is:  Do you test EVERY single subject line when you deploy emails?  You have to think based on the above that at least a few of the people sending these are trying to be relevant.  Perhaps not specific to their brand and products, but certainly to what people are likely to be thinking about today.  Were these subject lines conceived of and tested with the deployment?  Did they win or was I just part of the test cell?  How effective were these?  All questions we cannot answer specific to these inbox emails, but certainly can and should for ourselves.

And beyond subject lines, what other elements of emails should we be testing?  A lot of these answers depend on you, your product, your strategy, brand and goals.  The point is there is a lot to learn while deploying your emails and you should be actively implementing a detailed testing plan to insure you continually improve and drive incremental results.

One thing I like to do as well is keep a log of testing results that not only build and pass on that history but allow you as a marketer to demonstrate the impact of your efforts on driving revenue. Consider if you could tie every test to your KPIs and show that via testing you drove incremental results for your business?  Summarize these over the course of a month, quarter and year, and oftentimes you will find you have a compelling story.  While there will definitely be wins and some losses, the act of driving this accountability insures the wins will far outnumber the losses.

So how do you figure out a testing strategy and what to test?  One website I highly recommend for ideas and insights is whichtestwon (now called behave.org).  Especially fun to sign up for their emails where they send you a test and let you vote, then tell you the results.  And a bonus, in addition to tons of ideas for email testing, there are ones for virtually all your other executions as well.

Here's some general categories of items to think about testing related to email marketing:

- Certainly subject lines as we noted above and go beyond just the words.  Simple things like punctuation, capitalization, placement of words, use of emojis and more can have a dramatic impact.
- Body length - I did a test for a client while I was President of .Com marketing.  The test had generally the same content but the body copy of one was much longer than the other.  When we read the results, we found that while the short copy had more opens, the long copy had more engagement which was what we really wanted.  Publishers Clearing House is the king of this kind of long copy engagement with their mailers.  That's why there are multiple pages, stickers and things to go through in the envelope.  Their testing clearly showed more engagement when they provide more opportunities to do so.  This ultimately leads to more entries.  We saw those same type of results with our direct mail while I was at Sears Home Services.
- Content type - there are many options here - should you include benefits, pricing, offers and deals, imagery, what kind of imagery, how much, headlines...again, simple things can make a difference.  At Stow, we tested extensively and one thing we found was that simply putting people in images increased performance.  Pricing is another area of contention oftentimes in business and when and how you should use and embrace it.  Testing of course will tell you, but generally my experience has been that sharing pricing too early in the process can reduce your opportunity for engagement.
- Specificity - there are some good tests on behave.org that address this.  Should you be more or less specific and when would one work better than another?  Should you provide detailed steps or general guides?  How should you present those specifics:  list, within a box, in bold or another color, highlighted...lots of tests to conceive to impact your KPIs.
- Timing of emails - this is one of the topics that I discussed in a past blog and one of my pet peeves.  The reality is timing and effectiveness are definitely tied together, but I wonder how many marketers even test timing.  If I look at all the endless, irrelevant, SOUR emails I get in my inbox, I think this is a big opportunity for all of us to improve.

I could go on with more, but the point is, TEST!

Today's Tips for Better Testing:

- Get great ideas from behave.org - one of my favorite emails that I love to read.
-  Have an ongoing testing program for emails (and other areas of marketing).
-  Set the appropriate KPIs for each test with a hypothesis and expected results.
-  Accumulate your testing performance and showcase to leadership your wins and the impact you are having on the business.  This makes it very easy come budget season as well to obtain the funding for those testing tools and perhaps new ones.
- ALWAYS test your subject lines.
-  Leverage the built in testing tools that your ESP provides as well as Google's testing capabilities or other paid providers.  I especially like Optimizely as a tool that is easy to use and allows for fast learning

Change your culture to be one of continuous testing where failure and learning are embraced as an important part of growth and improvement.  Leverage the great tools out there to learn:  Adobe Target, Optimizely, Google and your ESPs.  Take the time to deliver a better experience to your prospect and customers. They will reward you with higher loyalty and bottom line results and you will not be a SOUR emailer!

EMAIL STRATEGY - Anatomy of an Email Inbox - Nov 2, 2016

Email statistics show that on average 18% of emails are opened.  Now we all know that a lot of people view their emails in preview panes and can get the idea of what you have to say without opening them.  In fact, Email Labs says that 69% of at-work email recipients read in preview pane.

So why are we even talking about open rates?  We need to ask ourselves what is the purpose of our email marketing, the subject line and content and how do we measure the effectiveness of these?  Obviously, the subject line is meant to tell the reader what the message is about and to catch attention.  But, like those really creative television ads that everyone remembers but no one buys as a result of, there needs to be more than a catchy subject line and more thought put into our emails and why we are sending them.

We spoke in our post on October 6th about email strategy overall.  Today, I'd like to focus in a bit on the subject lines, content and what that tells us about a companies email strategy and what we can learn.

So, as we think about our subject lines, let's start with what are and should be our goals and metrics.  Obviously open rates can be used as a comparative metric for the goal of gaining attention, but what else should we consider when assessing subject lines?  Do you and can you tie your emails to actual web visits (click throughs) and transactions?  If you do, how does this fit within the overall customer journey?  What role do you want emails and the subjects and content of those to play in your overall communications? Depending on who the person is, what the content is and what your product is, email could be more or less important to the journey towards purchase and play a role in how you manage that relationship and what you want to deliver in this channel.

Let's look at an example from clothing retailers to illustrate.

I have used many of my favorite clothing retailers as examples in past posts, organizations such as Macy's, Loft, White House, Black Market and Chicos.  My relationship with them is about need and desire to be fashionable, up-to-date, buy and own quality clothing that will last, be functional and perhaps to fulfill a specific clothing need such as for an event or activity.

When I look at 20+ of my recent emails however, virtually all the subject lines focus on sale messages:

Loft:  50% OFF = love at first bite (we mean, sight)
Macy's:  On the ballot: big savings on all your fave accessories!
White House Black Market:  Columbus Day Sale Starts Now.
Chicos:  A Berry Good Deal: 50% Off Sale

Are they doing this because their data shows that promotional subject lines have the best open rates or do they have data that shows this drives the best immediate sales?  Is this the best way to add value and build relationships with customers and prospects or are we as marketers driving less value to our brands by constantly offering deals and selling only based on a deal?  Are we even thinking about ways to engage our customers via email other than by offering a deal and trying to drive an immediate sale? Is there something more to the subjects and email communication that we should be considering?

I know as a consumer, I would be interested in reading about latest trends and colors, seeing great ideas on combining tops and pants or what the hot accessories are this month.  We buy fashion magazines, so clearly we are interested in that kind of content.  However, the retailers we buy the products from don't help us with that type of content via email.  I ask, if I was receiving this type of content would I think first of that brand when I had the need for clothing and would I be more willing to buy it at a premium or at least not discounted?  Would this be a better way to solidify my long term relationship with that retailer and thus build lifetime customer value for them?  Perhaps the answer is "no" and this is not SOUR eMail.  There is the classic example of JC Penney and their attempt to become an everyday value retailer.  Now I am sure this strategy didn't fail due to a poor email strategy, but it speaks to the challenge for marketers of remaining relevant, driving value and becoming the brand of choice when clothing (or any product or that matter) is needed.

How do we develop a thoughtful, relevant, personalized and timely email strategy that connects our customers and prospects to our brand in a meaningful way and drives value for both of us?

Today's Tips for Better Email Strategy:

-  Understand the customer journey and what role email plays and can play for your products and brands.
-  Ask your customers what kind of content they care about and deliver it via email.
-  Think about how this email content connects to your overall content strategy and how you tie your communication vehicles together for a comprehensive strategy.
-  Think about different types of email, what makes them relevant and when and how to deliver them.  So for example for our clothing retailers, should they be sending fashion trends content during the debut season for designers?  A good example of providing value beyond the sale is from Shaw Industries.  They sell flooring products, but do an excellent job of making flooring experiential. Each year they feature a color of the year to show that flooring choices are more than just the carpet or hardwood you buy and giving you a bigger reason to care about their brands.
-  Make sure you focus on the right metrics in your emails and consider that you should have different metrics based on the type of emails.
-  When looking at email statistics, classify the emails by type and set metrics standards based on those types.  For example, promotional emails, transaction emails, newsletters versus sales emails should have different metrics.
- Change the cadence of your emails based on the type of content, subject and based on what consumers desire and what you know about them and their behaviors.  A good article was recently published by Marketo and one of the points covered is cadence and the impact of good segmentation and targeting.  The chart below shows graphically what this looks like.

-  And of course, test and learn on a continual basis.

Use these email strategy tips to create an insightful, actionable and ROI driven approach to email marketing that wins for both you and your customers.  Don't be a SOUR emailer with no strategic approach to your email marketing efforts!

Source:
Marketo Email Blunders