1. Boast to your subscribers about your prowess in email marketing. And do it often. They really care about this.
2. Forget about what your subscribers want; you’re in this to generate revenue. So, be sure to send them an email everyday and eventually they’re bound to buy something. Or opt out.
3. Remember, you’re not really sending emails or communications, your sending “blasts” and all that the name implies. Get those subscribers in your sights and blast and blast away.
4. You know all those white papers, articles and blogs that cover email marketing best practices? Print them out and turn them into paper airplanes. C’mon, no one knows better than you anyway.
5. People signed up for your email so they must obviously want it. They crave it. That said, don’t spend too much time thinking about what you send, they’ll be happy to get anything. They’re so needy.
6. Don’t waste money on an email expert to run your program since any bozo can do the job. No bozos around?  Grab someone from the mail room; they’re experts with the mail, right?
7. Choose an email service provider based on the following criteria: A) they can send email, and B) they are the cheapest ones around. Don’t be bothered with trivial things like does their user interface and service support suck.
8. Never grow your list organically when you can buy a list with 4 million opt-in names for just $99. Hey, who doesn’t love a bargain?
9. And finally, be sure to let your CMO or president tell you how to run the show. Just because he or she does not fully understand what you do, that’s no reason to think they can’t do it better.

Pearls, indeed.

Click here for Andrew Kordek’s complete post.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Image courtesy of smoothtransitionslawblog.com

We’re all aware that email marketing is one of the most cost efficient and effective ways to reach your target audience. But if you’re not conducting A/B tests, you could be short changing your open rates, click-through rates and conversions. Creating two different versions (A and B) of your email and sending each to a different half of your database allows you to easily see what resonates with your target and what doesn’t.

Treat it like science
A/B testing provides an objective way of evaluating message effectiveness in what is traditionally an intuitive creative process. As such, it’s important to approach your tests like a true science experiment. First, send out a well executed eblast that will serve as your benchmark, against which you’ll measure the results of your A/B test.

The next step is to optimize/modify two new versions of the eblast to see how the change impacts the results. For example, you may want to experiment with two different subject lines, the placement of a button, the call to action, or simply the background color. What’s important to remember here is that for a true A/B test, you should only test one change at a time. That way you can clearly determine which change is influencing the target’s behavior.

See what pulls
Once you have these two new and different versions, deploy each to one half of your database and see how the results compare to your benchmark figures. Look at how many people opened each email, clicked through and converted across the call to action. This analysis will help you identify fallout points which influence where and what you should focus on for subsequent A/B tests. From there, you can continue to modify the message or design in your quest for even better results. But remember, only one change at a time.

Broader application
A/B testing isn’t just for eblasts. You can apply the same techniques to landing pages, web banners, paid search ads and more.

The bottom line
A/B testing makes sense for a number of reasons. It allows you to prove a point that may not have been supported by empirical data in the past, e.g. this headline will pull better than that one. Plus, it adds a level of accountability to the process which may, eventually, help you build a bigger interactive marketing budget. And who couldn’t use that?

Bookmark It

Hide Sites