Continuous Testing

HubSpot recently posted an blog article comparing which was better for engagement, plain text emails or HTML emails. In a survey they sent out in 2014, 64% of the responses said they preferred the HTML and image-based emails. It seems pretty straight forward, recipients say they want HTML emails over text based emails but through their A/B testing, the text versions had a higher open rate.
They also reported:

  • Adding GIFs decreased the opens by 37%
  • HTML template lowered opens by 25%
  • Heavy HTML with images lowered open rates by 23%

HubSpot tested the theory over 10 mailings then looked at the click through rates. As the number of images increased, the number of clicks decreased.
What HubSpot’s results tells me is that senders may be missing out on engagement by not identifying what their recipients want.  Testing is a critical aspect of email marketing by continuously looking at how to send the type of content your recipients are wanting. Many ESPs have built-in support for automated split A/B testing.
There are many ways to compare what works best for your recipients including:

  • Testing various subject lines
  • Changing PreHeader text
  • Relocating and adjusting the colors of your call to actions
  • Providing the option to receive either HTML or Text based emails
  • Adjusting the send time

There are many more options for A/B  testing.  Sending engaging emails is a top priority for email marketers and senders should continuously test to discover what works best for their recipients.
 

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Salesforce published their State of Marketing report last week. The report was compiled after receiving 5,000 responses to their questionnaire. Reading the report it is clear, email is critical to businesses. 73% of marketers believe email marketing is core to their business, 71% felt mobile marketing was core, and 66% of social media marketing was core to their business.
Other interesting figures are, 47% reported that the click-through rate as the most important email marketing metric and 23% didn’t know what device emails are read on.
Comparing the 2015 responses to the 2014 survey, email as a primary revenue source increased from 16% to 20%, email as a critical enabler of products and services increased from 42% to 60%, and email as an indirect impact of business performance decreased from 42% to 20%.
It is clear that email as a marketing tool will see increase usage in 2015. The report isn’t just reporting responses, it has several good recommendations such as doing a spring-cleaning of your email list and suggests sending a re-engagement campaign that invites subscribers to update their preference. This would give users the ability to opt-out as they may only have been interested in holiday deals and making it easy to opt-out will help prevent users from reporting the email as spam.

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ISP filters are good for marketers

A throwback post from 2010 Attention is a limited resource.
Marketing is all about grabbing attention. You can’t run a successful marketing program without first grabbing attention. But attention is a limited resource. There are only so many things a person can remember, focus on or interact with at any one time.
In many marketing channels there is an outside limit on the amount of attention a marketer can grab. There are only so many minutes available for marketing in a TV or radio hour and they cost real dollars. There’s only so much page space available for press. Billboards cost real money and you can’t just put a billboard up anywhere. With email marketing, there are no such costs and thus a recipient can be trivially and easily overwhelmed by marketers trying to grab their attention.
Whether its unsolicited email or just sending overly frequent solicited email, an overly full mailbox overwhelms the recipient. When this happens, they’ll start blocking mail, or hitting “this is spam” or just abandoning that email address. Faced with an overflowing inbox recipients may take drastic action in order to focus on the stuff that is really important to them.
This is a reality that many marketers don’t get. They think that they can assume that if a person purchases from their company that person wants communication from that company.

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Loren McDonald has a great post over at Mediapost listing his email marketing pet peeves. I particularly love this because he includes those things annoy him as a subscriber.
Most of what annoys me as a subscriber is sloppy marketing. Really is it so hard to actually check what you’re sending and who you’re sending it to?
elloIFNAME
This was a notice from Ello telling me that they’d get to my request for an account “at some point.” There were two fails here. The first is very obvious from the To: line. The second is even worse. I have an Ello account, I’m not waiting. Apparently they pulled their “current user” file and added it to the “waiting user” file and then mailed all of them a notice the accounts were getting turned on, albeit slowly.
The footer of the mail made it clear they knew they were spraying and praying:

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