ESP | Blog Tag – Enabler

Email is an excellent way of communicating with your customers and there are always ways to improve interaction. You may have heard the terms ‘AB testing’, ‘split testing’ or ‘multi-variant testing’ being batted around in the marketing world but what is it… and why should you be doing it?

A/B testing is taking two (or more) versions of something and displaying these different versions to selections of users to determine which one works better. The term can be used for many areas of marketing but I’m going to focus on email. With email testing, we look at open rates and click through rates to determine which variant of the email has performed the best.

Well-planned A/B testing can make a huge difference to the effectiveness of your campaigns.

It’s important to test because no database is the same as another and you can’t just rely on research by others and apply it to your own campaigns. Even within industries, there can be huge discrepancies between what works for one company and what works for another.

The first thing to do when planning an A/B test is to figure out exactly what you’re trying to improve. Are you looking to improve your open rates or click through rates? Are you trying to work out what type of email best suits your audience or are you testing content? Whatever you’re looking to improve, there’s a test for it. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

Subject line

This is one of the first tests I’d recommend running. It’s really effective for boosting open rates. You can try testing anything from the length of the subject line, to using your customer’s names, to referring to the offer in the email. Whatever you do, remember to make them different enough to notice an effect. The great thing with subject lines is that you can test multiple subject lines at once. I’ve run campaigns where we’ve tested up to 10 subject lines in one go!

Subheader

This is the first piece of text within the email template and sometimes also displays alongside the subject line in the recipient’s inbox, depending on the email client. If the first text in your template is ‘Click her to view this email online’ you’re missing out on an additional opportunity to get your message across to your audience.

Headline

As one of the first parts of your email the customer sees, this is a pretty good section to test. You can try posing a question or relating the headline copy to the rest of the email – it’s up to you.

Call to action

This is another section of your email to really dedicate some testing time to. It’s the part of the email which can determine whether your customer takes the action you want. You can test creative look and feel, or the copy itself.

Personalisation

Are you going to use your customers name within the email? How about relevant information? For example, if you work in the insurance industry you might include a policy number or the name of their pet (but maybe only do the pet one if you specialise in pet insurance, otherwise you’re headed down the stalker route!). Personalising an email can help engage your customers. This doesn’t work for all email recipients, which is why it’s perfect for testing. Read our blog on personalisation for more tips and ideas on this subject.

Creative

The layout of your email is one aspect with which you can have endless hours of testing fun. You may decide you want to put different sections of your emails in different places to see what gets more traction from this alternative placement in the design.

Testimonials

This is fairly simple. If you’ve got the testimonials to back up your product, why not try them out to see if they boost engagement?

Time of day

Timing is another effective variable to test. I’ve seen this have more impact with B2B than B2C databases, due to the flow of the work day. For example, some people prefer to check their emails on their commute or during their lunch break but are more likely to interact with them towards the end of the work day on the commute home. However, you may find that your B2C database prefers morning sends to afternoon sends, or vice versa. Either way, it’s an easy and effective aspect to test.

Imagery

Imagery is one of my favourite elements to test, mainly because it’s really interesting to see if customers are affected by imagery. If you have a picture of your product in there, how do users react to it? You can also test placement and quantity of imagery.

Amount of content

Content testing works especially well for blog based emails or newsletters. Providing customers with too many articles can cause a paradox. If there’s too much choice, to the point where the user feels overwhelmed, they may not take any action. However, in other databases you might find that the more content you include in these emails, the more click throughs you get.

Wording of offers

Choice of wording can be applied to almost any area in an email but the one I’ve seen work the best is copy surrounding discounts. Some customers may respond to ‘50% off’, whereas others may prefer seeing ‘£20 off’. How you word your offers can have a big impact on the click through rate, so this is an important consideration for those of you running promotional emails.

Overview

The key thing to remember when selecting a test is to make sure you only do one test at a time. In order to determine what has had the impact on your interaction lift, you need to know exactly what it was that worked. If you try testing subject lines and creatives at the same time, it’s very difficult to pinpoint exactly what made the difference and if one test affected the outcome of another.

The second thing you should do is work out who you are going to test on. As general best practice, I’d always test on a statistically relevant percentage of your data and then roll out the winning result to the rest. This ensures you are exposing the majority of your customers to the winning version.

Thirdly, make sure you’re always keeping a record of the tests you have run and what the outcome was. You can then use these findings, and apply them to subsequent campaigns. Having said this, if you find something that works don’t just stop testing that element. For example, if you find a particular style of subject line that engages your audience don’t just assume this will work for your customers forever.

Imagine you got the same style of subject line for all the emails you received in the next three months ‘Andrew, check out these new offers’…. over and over again. You’d get bored, we all would. When email subscribers get bored, they stop interacting. We call this having ‘list fatigue’ and it happens when brands tactics have gone stale. To ensure this doesn’t happen to you, make sure you keep on testing and trying out new things to keep your subscribers interested.

You may find several elements that work really well for you and you can keep these on rotation to use when the previous formula stops working.

A/B testing is such an interesting area of email marketing. It’s a chance to get creative with your emails and really get to know your customers, finding out what makes them tick and improving your results at the same time. I hope you have fun testing your emails and that you boost your campaigns as a result. And as always, if you have any questions about this subject or what we do here at Enabler, get in touch.

Email is constantly evolving. As email marketers, part of the fun of what we do is exploring new ways to engage audiences with email. It can also be a struggle at times. Email inboxes are increasingly crowded with promotional emails as more and more companies use email to communicate.

To help the end user, organisations like Google have customised their inbox layouts to include the segregation of promotional emails from the primary inbox, social media emails and general updates. These updates make it trickier for your emails to get noticed in subscriber’s inboxes, so it’s important to make your campaign attention-grabbing. One of the best methods we’ve seen over the years is by introducing dynamic content into email campaigns.

Dynamic content is essentially using what you know about your customers to provide them with content that is relevant to them. This can be anything from knowing the gender of your users and using the information to show them female/male specific products, to using birthday information to create a personalised birthday message for them each year. This technique allows you to send highly targeted information to your subscribers, and the best part is you can do it all through one email.

What are the benefits?

Higher levels of engagement
It might seem simple, but it also makes a lot of sense. Why would subscribers be interested in your campaign if it’s not relevant to them? To engage people, you need to provide content they find useful or enjoyable (or hopefully both!).

Saves time
Before dynamic content existed, companies would spend unbelievable amounts of time creating separate emails for the same campaign. It was the only way to do it if you wanted to try and personalise. Now, the only bit which takes any time is the creation of the main email and then positioning your content in a dynamic setting.

Shorter emails
This might seem like an odd one but many users don’t actually scroll all the way down to the end of an email; they scan for a couple of seconds and if they don’t find what they want they close the email. Goodbye to your click thru rates. Dynamic content enables emails to be shorter as you’re not trying to squeeze everything into one email in the hope that everyone on your database will find something interesting.

It’s technically interesting!
One for the front-end nerds out there. Dynamic coding is pretty fun (this is system dependent, of course). We’re very lucky with Enabler because it makes coding really easy to do. Enabler, like some other systems, will allow you to view the email in situ as anyone in your database would. This means no messy test emails, and no time wasting!

How can you get started?

The number one thing you need for dynamic content to work is information about your subscribers. There are lots of types of data you can use to make it work and you can even be inspired by your data:

Behavioural data – what have your users done before? What have they bought or read? When they were last on your website, what caught their eye? This data is incredibly useful when planning your campaigns. It can allow you to distinguish marketing to your leads and to your existing customers. It can influence what call to actions you use, where you use them, and other content placement decisions. It can also be used to influence pre-emptive emails based on previously purchased content.Groupon

Transactional data – what did your customers spend their money on? How often do they do this? Are they abandoning their baskets at checkout? Transactional data gives you incredible insight into the buying potential of your customers. Using this information, you could send reminder emails to customers who have left products in their baskets, remind customers of special offers based on content they’ve viewed, and provide buying recommendation emails based on previous purchases.

Demographic data – what gender or age are your subscribers? Where are they based? Knowing a customer’s gender can be really useful for something like fashion based emails, knowing their location can help with events promotions or deals in shops local to them. One of the best examples I’ve seen of this is Groupon:

They send out daily emails which are targeted by region. All the offers in their emails actually contain deals which are near to the post code I provided them with, and the copy reflects this. Check out this ‘Afternoon tea for two’ offer (right). It tells me how far from me it is, what the discount is, mentions the word Londoners and it really pushes the personalisation of the email in the top banner.

If you want to take all of this a step further, once you have completed your dynamic campaign you can also do some reporting on the campaign to find out what worked, then tailor your next campaign based on this information. Remember, with all of these options, testing is key.

The final checklist for dynamic content success

1. Accurate data – there’s no point trying without this. Why use information about your database if it’s not correct?

2. An Email Service Provider that supports dynamic content (if you want more information about Enabler, get in touch)

3. Knowledge of your customer database – what sort of targeting do you think will work on your list? For fashion brands, the key one is gender, for insurance we’re looking at regions and preference based sending, but what will work for your brand?

4. Testing – keep trying new things, A/B test to your hearts content. Never stop testing your email campaigns!

In today’s market, there is no better way to improve results of your campaigns than through dynamic content. Dynamic content is to the email marketing world what Dumbledore is to the wizarding world. Pure brilliance.

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A/B testing your email… easy as 1,2,3?