MarketingExperiments Blog: Research-driven optimization, testing, and marketing ideas

MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2012 kicked off Wednesday, February 8 with Sergio Balegno, Director of Research, MECLABS, and Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, CEO and Managing Director, MECLABS, the parent company of MarketingExperiments.

Sergio emphasized this is a research-based event driven by the 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, featuring W. Jeffrey Rice, Senior Research Analyst, as the lead author. This book is our ninth annual benchmark study.

The benchmark report includes research and insights from 2,735 marketers, and identifies barriers to email marketing success and what marketers are doing to overcome them.

For example, here’s a chart from the report that illustrates email marketing challenges:

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As you can see, email marketers are facing a wide variety of issues at fairly high percentages. Everything from data systems integration to email efficiency comes in at 40%, or higher.

“Challenges to email marketing success are pervasive and growing,” said Sergio.

Flint immediately gave the audience empirical evidence that there are no expert marketers, only experienced testers. He added several slides to his presentation deck showing the result of a recent MarketingExperiments test on a Web clinic email subject line.

Paul Cheney, Junior Editorial Analyst , MECLABS, came up with a Web clinic title based on a style that has worked well in the past, and Flint challenged the model by writing a title that reflected a hypothesis he wanted to test with the audience.

After the test reached validity, Paul sent this email to Daniel Burstein, Director of Editorial Content, MECLABS:

From: Cheney, Paul
Sent: Tuesday, February 07, 2012 10:21 AM
To: Burstein, Daniel
Subject: headlines on deadlines

Dude,

My clinic headline beat Flint’s by 92.2%. Significant.

Thank you,

Paul Cheney

This test perfectly illustrates the value of testing over just applying “best practices” concepts for email elements like subject lines. Or as Flint put it, “There are no expert marketers. There are only experienced testers.”

Here’s another test on email message calls-to-action based on a campaign conducted by a previous Email Summit attendee.

The set up:

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Flint says, “This is the control.” Here is the top of the original email:

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And, here is the bottom of the original email with the call-to-action highlighted:

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This image shows both the old and new calls-to-action. The CTA was the only element of the email that was changed:

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“There’s a difference in the thought sequence,” says Flint.

“In the first, you’re being asked to do something. In the second, you’re being asked to become someone. The second has more value because it connects to your identity.” What difference did this simple change make? Here are the results of the test:

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Related Resources:

Marketing Research Chart: Top email campaign elements routinely tested to optimize performance – Part 1 of 2

Quick Lifts: 4 ideas to increase email clickthrough

Test Your Marketing Intuition: Which email achieved 104% more clicks?

Global Email Marketing: 3-part campaign sent in six languages averages 28% CTR

Email Marketing Research: 7 steps for successful email marketing testing and optimization

The majority of B2B organizations are increasing their marketing budgets for inbound marketing tactics. One of the most popular of those inbound tactics is virtual events and webinars, with 60% of marketers increasing their investment according to the MarketingSherpa 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report.

“It is essential for organizations to gain the trust of their buyers before they can hope to convert them,” said Jen Doyle, the Benchmark Report’s lead author. “Webinars offer an effective platform to improve thought leadership and reputation, both essential components to winning trust. The cost effectiveness of webinars is just the icing on the cake, so many organizations are shifting to include webinars as part of their marketing plans.”

Of course, a webinar isn’t very effective if no one attends. So in today’s MarketingExperiments blog post, Gaby Paez and I will give you some test ideas for those all important webinar invite emails (and if you’d like to see how we craft our own webinar invite emails, just sign up) by reviewing a live optimization submission from The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

Gaby is associate director of Research at MECLABS, and you can hear more of her test ideas in the Web clinic replay, Email Messaging: How overcoming 3 common errors increased clickthrough 104%, along with some of the audience’s optimization advice for this submission.

Here’s the submission (and you can view it online as well) …

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BACKGROUND

Email – Invitation to a paid social media webinar, “Going Mobile: How Nonprofits Succeed,” which features a bonus opportunity to gain access to “an exclusive discussion group” and three speakers:

• Felicia Carr, Senior Director of Online Communications, National Parks Conservation Association
• Jason Wood, Director of Digital Communications Services, Salvation Army National Headquarters
• Cody Switzer, Assistant Web Editor, The Chronicle of Philanthropy

Audience – Nonprofit professionals in fund-raising, marketing, social media and development

Objective – To get registrants for a paid webinar

  Read more…

After wrapping our most recent Web clinic, Email Messaging: How overcoming 3 common errors increased clickthrough 104%, our in-house documentarian, Luke Thorpe, and I grabbed lead speaker Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS, to discuss a few key takeaways from the Web clinic …

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I asked Flint about:

• Some of the most common mistakes email marketers are making
• Flipping the sales and marketing funnel
• How marketers can optimize the messaging in their emails and improve conversion
• How the audience reacted to the Web clinic

Flint answered by discussing:

• The micro conversions in an email
• How the current funnel-based sales and marketing model is broken
• The micro-decision funnel
• The value exchange fulcrum
• Overcoming assumed value

You can view the full 60-minute Web clinic, including live optimization examples, for free – Email Messaging: How overcoming 3 common errors increased clickthrough 104%

Related Resources:

MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2012

MarketingSherpa 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report

Email List Hygiene: Remove four kinds of bad addresses to improve deliverability

Email Marketing: Improve conversions with better landing pages

Email Marketing: Increase clicks and conversions with obvious links and consistent messaging

“The goal of an email is to get a click.” –Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director and CEO, MECLABS

Editor’s Note: It’s a simple concept and you have likely heard it a lot if you’re a regular MarketingExperiments reader. If you can provide your prospect with enough value to get them to click out of their crowded, highly competitive inbox and onto your landing page, the email has done its job.

Of course, it’s one thing to be able to say what the goal of an email is, and another thing entirely to accomplish it. It takes a lot of experience testing and optimizing emails to develop your own internalized methodology for writing effective email messaging.

To fill that void, Adam Lapp, our Associate Director of Optimization and Strategy, was kind enough to lend us his years of experience in testing and optimizing emails and give us real optimization ideas for a specific audience-submitted email. By observing how Adam looks at a page, we can get a glimpse into the methodology he uses to optimize an email and draw out some transferable principles to apply to our own pages.

The following email was submitted by Zoe. The audience for the email is marketing managers and above. The objective is to introduce clients to the benefits of Data Enhancement through a free, downloadable whitepaper.

Email Sample: 

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So from here, I’ll let Adam take it away.

4 ideas for getting more clicks in the email:

Overall, this is a relatively good email. There are several things marketers could take away from the email as it is. For example:

• There is a clear problem and solution presented
• The benefits of the solution are clearly articulated
• The whitepaper has an image associated with it to make it feel more robust/tangible
• The side column is used for supporting material
• Personalization is used in the signature

With that said, I came up with a few ideas to increase the performance. Here they are in no particular order: Read more…

In July, I wrote the blog post, Email Marketing Research: 7 steps for successful email marketing testing and optimization. In it, I discussed how continuous experimentation is the quickest path to peak performance. It enables marketers to go beyond best practices to learn what works for their organization and, more importantly, their customers.

I’m preaching to the choir, right? Well, I also encouraged readers to take the annual email benchmark survey conducted by MarketingExperiments’ sister company, MarketingSherpa.

Thankfully, this blog’s readers, along with more than 2,700 other email marketers, participated in the study. In appreciation, I would like to share with you the current state of email marketing testing practices.

Email testing on the rise

The number of marketers who routinely test email campaigns rose 3% from 2010 to 42%. This is good news as the industry inches closer to making it a prevailing practice.

Unfortunately, nearly six of 10 email marketing budgets do not have any money earmarked for testing and optimization. The majority (63%) of tests are conducted by employees for whom the practice is a part-time and secondary job responsibility, but still a formal part of their job description.

The minority includes the 23% of the email researchers who report the task as their primary focus and full-time duty and the 19% of marketers who perform experiments on the side without it being listed in their job description.

Testing practices most routinely performed

This information may help benchmark your programs and processes against the industry. But for this year’s survey, we wanted to delve deeper into which formal processes and guidelines organizations routinely use to test and optimize email campaigns. Here is a look into what we found.

Chart: More time needed for brainstorming and defining the testing objective

How routinely does your organization implement the following testing practices?

The above chart displays common testing practices in chronological order from top to bottom. We asked marketers to share with us which tasks their organizations routinely execute. The survey uncovered organizations are spending the most time segmenting their lists, understanding the impact of the test on the entire funnel, and documenting their findings. Read more…

Email marketing has come a long way since the early days before CAN-SPAM laws and double opt-in email lists. Back then, it was easy to build a list and quickly get them to your offer pages. The average email recipient wasn’t bombarded with dozens, or even hundreds, of messages every day that need sorted or deleted.

Now, with email users being incredibly wary of any promotional email, most of the email we send gets deleted.

How do we ensure our emails get read and acted upon by the people on our list who need what we have to offer?

It essentially comes down to email messaging. If you can clearly communicate enough of your offer’s value in your email to earn a click, then you’ll more than likely see a significant increase in clickthrough (and ultimately profit).

We recently ran an email test for a research partner (anonymized in the emails) that needed to increase their number of leads from a rented list. One of the email treatments generated a 104% increase in clicks over the other. Here are the treatments: Read more…