Email segmentation, frequency, design: fascinating tests, critical lessons

Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on March 27, 2008

You're probably tired of people banging on about testing different aspects of your emails and email approach to see how a change or two might help. Test, blah, blah, test etc. Yawn...anything good on the TV tonight?

And while we're at it, do we really need to pay attention to all this fuss about "designing for blocked images" or "segmentation?" Do these things really make THAT much difference?

Some new articles will answer those questions and could change the way you think about email marketing and testing. (And I say this as an Englishman genetically predisposed to understatement.)

Let us begin with this case study of the Motorcycle Superstore. Read it quick before it goes behind a website membership barrier.

Wow!

The article lists a variety of tests they did, and how the insight generated affected campaign numbers. Just testing changes in frequency allowed them to increase revenues by up to 120%. Yep, testing just one thing more than doubled email sales.

(By the way, if you're troubled by the "how often should I send my emails?" question, some recent articles by Stefan Pollard, John Arnold and Loren McDonald may help.)

Motorcycle Superstore also split their list into groups based on product interests and sent each group different content. This segmentation doubled open rates and tripled CTR.

OK, testing certainly works. And segmentation looks seriously promising (assuming the results boosts carry through to revenues and the costs aren't too high). But let's learn more.

A case study of a hunting retailer (also by MarketingSherpa) explores the value of designing for images off.

The retailer tested an all-images design against one also with images, but where the main message was in text using table cells and a colored background.

The "designed for image blocking" email produced almost four times as much revenue.

Ye gads!

Now here's the but (there's always, always a but). In this particular case, the main message in the all-images email was particularly well suited for presentation in text form. This is not always the case. But you can't deny that the test and the safe design were worth doing.

And there's more where that came from.

A while back there was some debate about whether text links or button links work best when trying to get people to clickthrough to your website. The folks at AWeber decided to find out, setting up an appropriate test.

They just published the results. It's interesting to note that text links in context eventually outperformed button links.

But even more interesting is to see how the relative performance changed through time. AWeber were farsighted enough to keep testing the same thing again and again.

The first few tests saw the button generate far more clicks than the equivalent text links. But as time passed, the positions reversed.

The clear message: testing once is good. Testing again later is even better. Things change.

So testing has its risks. Test inappropriately and you could end up making the wrong decision. If AWeber had stuck with the button based on the initial tests, the CTR on their newsletters would have fallen in the long run.

There's another example buried in the Motorcycle Superstore article. When they tested the best day to send out email, the best day to send wasn't actually the best day to send. (I love that sentence.)

The send day that produced the best results for the day of the send was not the same as the send day that produced the best overall results:

"Thursdays and Fridays performed the best, but only for that one day...emails sent on Mondays and Tuesdays had a longer lifespan and higher total conversion rate."

Fascinating!

To finish, a couple of other new links on these subjects. We know segmentation works, but if you're like me, you're probably scratching your head wondering how to do all that funky database stuff. Aaron Smith suggests it needn't be as tricky as you think.

And MailChimp have a few tips on testing from the Conversion Rate Experts.

Tags: email marketing, email testing, email segmentation, email design, image blocking

[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
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