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

If you have been following the blog over the past few weeks, you already know that Dr. Flint McGlaughlin recently taught live on “The 5 Best Ways to Optimize Email Response” at the 2010 MarketingSherpa Email Summit in Miami.

“The discomfort was worth it by all accounts!”

The session was very lively and included on-the-spot optimization of audience-submitted emails. Some even suggested cutting lunch to continue with more live optimization. You can watch a replay of the complete presentation below and here are a couple reviews from live attendees:

“Even if this was the third time I attended one of his lectures, I still learn from each new session. Flint is a tremendous speaker and his mathematical approach on all email marketing aspects based on serious testing is amazing.” – Kenny Van Beeck, EmailGarage

“After a reported late influx of attendees, people took to sitting on the floor to listen to the first session, delivered by Dr Flint McGlaughlin. The discomfort was worth it by all accounts!” – Mick Griffin, Get Response

(Replay) Optimizing Email Response – Part 1

Today we are hosting the “Part 2” of this presentation to focus on how to actually craft effective email messages. We will also be taking some additional time to work with and optimize your email campaigns live on today’s web clinic.

Today, we expect Dr. McGlaughlin to be as lively as he was in Miami. We hope you can make it to today’s presentation at 4PM EST.

Now, get some email optimization love of your own

Admittedly, we have already chosen most of the live audience submissions we will cover during today’s call. However, we did save one spot for our blog readers. So, if you have an email you would like us to look at today post a URL hosting the email in a comment or send it to us via email. We will choose one lucky blog reader from the submissions today. Good luck and see you this afternoon.

Clinic Notes, Email Marketing, Practical Application 2010 Email Summit, email, Email Marketing, email optimization, Flint McGlaughlin, marketing, MarketingSherpa, optimizing email

Email design always proves to be a hot topic with marketers. And when you have top agencies competing against each other, the fire just gets hotter as we learned during last week’s live web clinic – Maximize your Agency ROI: How adding science to the creative process reveals a 26% gain.

We received a plethora of questions, most which we could did not have time to address during the hour-long clinic. So, as with every Web Clinic Extra, we have picked a handful of the most common questions to address here on our blog. This week we pulled in Andy Mott, the Senior Manager of Research Partnerships, to answer these questions…

Email marketing is a topic that comes up often in the MarketingExperiments community. In fact, Dr. Flint McGlaughlin is delivering a keynote today at Em@il Summit ’10 in Miami as well as teaching a pre-summit Live Email Optimization Workshop. If you couldn’t make it out there this year to get valuable insights from your peers and industry leaders, come back to the blog on Friday for some key takeaways from this year’s summit.

You can view a replay of the clinic or read the latest issue of MarketingExperiments Journal. Our next live web clinic, The Five Best Ways to Optimize Email Response (Part 2): How to craft effective email messages that drive your customers to action, will be taught on February 3rd from 4 to 5 p.m. EST.

Clinic Notes, Email Marketing, Marketing Q&A agencies, andy mott, audience question, design competition, email, email design, Email Marketing, Exact target, q and a, ROI, Web Clinic Extra

How much will companies spend on email marketing this year? According to Forrester, that number is well over one billion dollars. And still email designs are being sent out without any clue as to how well they perform. It is not uncommon to see the “most beautiful” email messages that follow all the “best-practice” guidelines and have a committee of “design experts” backing them underperform – as if spending more than a billion dollars wasn’t enough!

So we want to see if you can tell the difference. We ran an experiment with three top-of-the-line agency-designed email messages. We want to know if you can spot the email design that performed best. (A prize for all the winners this time)

Background: This email test ran for Pier 1 Imports, which I will assume most of you know is a large B2C company selling home products. This email in particular was a seasonal promotion going to a segment of their house list. There are three agency-designed email messages (Treatments 1-3) being tested against Pier 1’s baseline version (Control).

Test Design: This was a simple A/B/C/D multi-factorial test. While we also measured open rate and conversion rate, the objective was to increase the clickthrough rate. Here are the page versions (click to zoom in):

Control                                              Treatment 1

Treatment 2                                      Treatment 3

Results: So now that you understand the experiment background and have seen the treatments, can you spot which email performed the best? Before we reveal the results, here’s a chance to test your own marketing intuition and be regarded as a world-renowned marketing leader!

1. Which email generated the highest clickthrough?

• Control
• Treatment 1
• Treatment 2
• Treatment 3

UPDATE: Surprise! The Control was the winner. Each of the agency-designed treatments underperformed the original (one of which decreased clickthrough by 52%). Congratulations to Ben, the only correct response we received before we announced the results on yesterday’s web clinic. You can follow Ben on twitter at @findingforrest. Also, subscribe to the MarketingExperiments Journal to be notified when the web clinic replay and research brief are available so you can see the correct answer, the results of the control and treatments, and how these experiments can help you shape your own marketing campaigns.

Clinic Notes, Email Marketing, General, Research Topics clinic, email, Email Marketing, email optimization, marketing, optimization, webinar

During the Optimize your Email in Three Steps web clinic, I covered several measurement strategies to help you measure and prove the real value of your email campaigns. I was inundated with questions. Marketers are constantly in search of new “tricks” to find the perfect numbers that help them understand and tell the real story of their Internet marketing efforts.

While I was able to answer a few of these questions on Web Clinic Extra, I wanted to dive a little deeper today with some links and walkthroughs showing how to implement some of the metric items discussed. And please note, while these examples use Google Analytics, Omniture and many other companies have excellent tools with similar capabilities.

Tagging links within emails so you can measure email clicks within your Google Analytics

Requirements:

• Links tagged in email with Google Analytics tracking variables
• Destination Pages from the email with Google Analytics tracking code installed

Walkthrough:
First, with your emails, identify what links you want to track. For some people, just tracking CTA is enough, for others looking at additional navigational links (for example a supplied news article link or a support link) is also valuable data as well. Once you have compiled a list of links that you want to track, visit Google’s URL Builder Tool and start building your links. Please note that campaign source, medium, and name are minimum input requirements for this sort of tracking to work. You also have some remaining variables (name and content) you can use to insert segmentation data. In the example below, you will note that we inputted some demographic and business data:

Once you have built your links, insert them in the appropriate places in your email and hit the red button.

Please note, that using this tool is not necessary to build these links. Once you learn what variables are used, you can build a script that will automate this for you. You can then use internal databases of customer information to create dynamic and automated email tracking.

Also, once these emails go out, you can then create segments on these parameters and get targeted and segmented metrics for your email efforts:

As a final note, make sure you install Google Analytics on the page your audience will visit. This will be required to measure the clicks. Google Analytics tracking code is not required to be in the email, just the landing or website page they are landing on. The tracking script will read the URL variables that you put in your links in the email and recognize the data.

You can also apply these metrics to ecommerce and other reporting data within Google Analytics, giving you a further layer that attributes efforts to the bottom line.

How to incorporate form fields in goal reporting

Requirements:

• Adding the “onClick” markup JavaScript function in the form field you want to track
• Page must have Google Analytics tracking code installed

Walkthrough:
When I reviewed an example goal setup in the Optimize your Email in Three Steps web clinic, one of the steps I mentioned was a form field click as a goal step. In reviewing the clinic comments, I was stunned by the number of people that wanted to know how to do this and for me to explain further, so here we go.

First, as part of looking at email performance, many of us are sending users to pages that have form captures. For me, a great user experience or path to look at is users that click from the email, land on the target page, actually click into the form, and then submit/convert. So let’s look at a typical form code example, and how Google Analytics (GA) ties in:

Standard form input code example:

We can insert an onClick function to the form to capture when a user clicks into the field and complete the information. With this function we will be making a call to the GA tracking function: _trackPageview. What this function will do in our case is when a user clicks into the form field a page will be created in Google Analytics that we specify/create. For example purposes, with the page tracker function we will create the page /dec-email/form-field-email1.html.

After users have interacted with the form field, the /dec-email/form-field-email1.html will start to appear. Just to clarify, this page does not exist, but we have told GA to record clicks and interactions to the tagged form field to this mythological page we have made up. Also, if you are doing email testing, you could create a script that recognizes which email people are coming (e.g. URL variable) from and change this page dynamically as well. So instead of posting clicks to /dec-email/form-field-email1.html page, we use email2.html. Here is an example of Google Analytics markup on the form field:

Also, users tend to be quite “click happy” on forms, so make sure you look at unique visit data on these “pages,” rather than pageviews. Pageviews tend to be inflated because of this user behavior.

Lastly, once these “pages” are created in Google Analytics, you can insert them in goal funnels, just like other real pages. Your metrics will not skip a beat. Here is an example goal funnel that you could create in Google Analytics with the items we have covered:

**Make sure, if applicable, that you select the required step in your goal setup.

Leave a comment below and let me know the next measurement tricks you would like me to pull back the curtains on in future installments of the Magical Metrics Tour. Also, let me know if you find posts about custom or deeper metrics helpful.

For a more in-depth look at making email and social media deliver for your bottom line, check out Email Summit ‘10 in Miami from January 20-22. PLUS, Dr. Flint McGlaughlin will teach a Pre-Summit Live Email Optimization Workshop to help you maximize your email capture rate and quality. Register by January 8 to receive an early bird discount of $200.

Analytics & Testing, Clinic Notes, Email Marketing, Internet Marketing Strategy, Marketing Q&A, Research Topics analytics, clinic, email, Email Marketing, email optimization, marketing, online marketing

During our December 2 web clinic, Optimize your Email in Three Steps, Boris Grinkot, Heather Andruk, and Corey Trent answered questions from our audience about email relevance, frequency, and metrics.

We often don’t have time to answer all of our audience questions on the live web clinics. So we distilled all the questions into a few representative queries, and pulled Heath Andruk and Corey Trent in from the lab to share their insights on the latest edition of Web Clinic Extra:

Corey and Heather answered these questions:

Question 1 (1:05): In the frequency experiment shown on the clinic, was there variation in the types of emails (i.e. reminders, offers) in the low frequency email group (i.e. 1-4 per month) like there were in the higher frequency group?

Question 2 (1:45): What are some factors to determine good segments?

Question 3 (2:40): What do you do if you cannot segment?

Question 4 (5:00): Is there one age group more tolerable to frequent emails than others?

Question 5 (6:40): How do you figure out the best timing for emails?

Question 6 (9:55): Can you track goal pages that are outside of your domain with Google Analytics?

Question 7 (10:55): Can you track an email campaign in Google Analytics if you are sending emails with a 3rd party provider?

Come back to the blog on Friday for a technical addendum from Corey Trent. He has some specific tips to help you put his metrics wizardry into revenue-generating practice for your email campaigns.

The complete Flash version of the web clinic, along with a downloadable research brief (PDF), are now available on MarketingExperiments.com. If you have additional questions, use the comments section below or post them to our MarketingExperiments Optimization group.

Clinic Notes, Email Marketing, General, Marketing Q&A, Research Topics clinic, email, Email Marketing, email optimization, marketing, online marketing, optimization, Web Clinic Extra

On December 3rd in Haarlem, The Netherlands, Dr. Flint McGlaughlin spoke at the Dutch Email Marketing Association Summit, also known as the “Sexy” Email Event. The Director of MECLABS (the parent company of MarketingExperiments) discussed how to improve email and related landing page conversions and conducted live optimization of audience submissions. Below is one of those submissions, along with a conversion diagnosis that will hopefully give you some ideas to improve the performance of your own marketing efforts. Please note, it has been translated from its original language of Dutch.

This submission is a B2B website seeking to drive downloads of a whitepaper. Here is an interactive version of the page (rollover with your mouse and click to see comments):

For this particular page we have to assume that visitors are well qualified. They either have searched for “electric pallet trucks” or have navigated through the site to arrive here. Knowing this, the headline is pretty standard. It’s effective in several ways:
• Continuity between steps
• Communicates “where” visitors are

However, it does not answer two key questions:
• What can I do here? I don’t know if I can order, request more info, get a quote, or just view photos.
• Why should I order a pallet truck from Toyota instead of another competitor?

Several variations of the headline that add value and provide the visitor with guidance should be tested.

Value: You must add appeal, exclusivity, and credibility to give force to the value proposition of this product. Consider testing a quantitative variation such as: “Electric Pallet Trucks: 95% Customer Approval Rating” or “Electric Pallet Trucks: Crafted by Toyota for More Than 50 Years.”

Guidance: You must greet the visitor and “hold their hand” as they experience the page. In the primary headline, communicate value. But then in the sub-headline, you want to make it what exactly they can do on this page clear. For instance, “Download Product Details and Get Price Quotes.”

Once a visitor reads the headline, they are then forced to digest a bulky paragraph of six lines…a hard swallow. Most likely, your typical visitor may read the first or second line then have their eye-path drawn away from the paragraph by the large images. If you have important information in the last few lines, it will be missed. We recommend using a maximum of two-to-three lines of copy so that it’s easy to get to the point and move on to the next paragraph.

Also, there are no bolded words in the copy. This creates a disruption on the page that halts the eye-path and visitors just see one large chunk. Instead of moving seamlessly down the page, visitors may get lost in the copy. Important words such as “ergonomic” don’t stand out from trivial words such as “things.” It all just runs together.

You should also bold keywords so that your page adapts to different visitor segments. People who don’t like to read and just want to get to the point can just scan four words and move on. While people who need every single detail can still take their time reading the copy.

Where the heck do I click? Okay, so it looks like clicking on the triangles results in a whitepaper download. But they don’t appear clickable and they blend in with the images. This page should definitely make links that are directly below the images into buttons and ensure they have properties that make them appear clickable – such as bevel and drop shadow. Also, test button copy that is clear and provides a tangible benefit such as “Download Your Free Whitepaper.”

There is another place to click for visitors who already know all the information about the pallet trucks and are ready to buy. Do you see it? It takes a second, but it is at the bottom of the right column: “Yes, I want a quote for a pallet truck.” This is an important link for the actual bottom line of the company. People who click here are interested in buying. But it’s small, de-emphasized by location, and does not attract the visitor’s eye-path with color and so forth.

Someone ready for a quote does not need to download a white paper. So consider a test where this link is placed above the images, right after the paragraph. Also, a blue font will make it stand out from the other font. Blue is the Internet standard for a link and this color change will help make it more obvious that the link is clickable.

Dr. Flint McGlaughlin will next be speaking live about optimizing email response at MarketingSherpa’s Em@il Summit ’10 in Miami, Florida from January 20-22, 2010. He will also be teaching a live pre-summit Email Optimization Workshop on January 20.

Email Marketing, Practical Application design, email, Email Marketing, marketing, online marketing, optimization

This has not been a banner year for marketing budgets by any estimation. So you might be surprised that two tactics actually garnered increased budgets in 2009 – email and social media. Your peers consider email a highly cost-effective tactic and see social media as a way to extend that content to new markets. This research comes from MarketingSherpa’s 2010 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, which contains practical data to improve your budgeting and grow your overall business.

We’ve found email marketing to be a hot topic as well, with near-record attendance at Wednesday’s web clinic (If you couldn’t attend, please subscribe to the free MarketingExperiments Journal to be notified when the replay and research brief are available). To build on that clinic, which explored ways to maximize revenue from your house list, here is a cost-effective way to grow your list:

In the past year, low-cost has become the most popular modifier of the word “campaigns” for most marketers. Of course, you never want to sacrifice results simply for the sake of cost. According to the 2010 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, blog contests are an inexpensive way to quickly gain motivated subscribers. Here are the seven key steps to making the most of blog contests to rapidly grow your list:

Bullseye

There are highly relevant audiences for blogs on almost every interest under the sun, including Sun (Microsystems, that is) and, likely, an audience with interests very similar to your best customers. But, contrary to popular belief, these audiences aren’t all micro. According to the web-traffic analysts at Compete, some so-called “mommy blogs” get well over 100,000 unique visitors a month. For an example, see Dooce (if you’re a parent, you know what she’s referring to).

Lay down the law

Make sure you clearly define a set of rules to keep everything running smoothly. For example, you could give extra entries to readers who refer friends. Or even host a second, private contest for the blogger who generates the most entries. And remember, the more compelling the prize, the more motivated your audience will be.

…and he told two friends…and she told two friends

After you set up a landing page to explain the contest and capture entrant’s information and referrals, email referred prospects automatically and invite them to join the contest as well. With luck (and a compelling contest), you may reach the Holy Grail of cost-effective online promotion – going viral.

Seek the source

To understand which channels deliver best, create coded links to track traffic originating from blogs (with unique links for each blog), referrals, newsletter emails to current subscribers, social networks, etc. If you hold a separate blogger contest as well, you could create an anonymized tracking page to show bloggers how many entries they’ve generated compared to competitors, which may encourage them to step up efforts.

Release the hounds

Once you have the mechanics of the contest in place, finding the right bloggers will take a bit of hunting on your part. Here’s one simple strategy. Use basic Web searches to find applicable blogs. When you spot a likely target, use its “blog roll,” or links section, to find similar sites. Look at the sites’ number of RSS subscribers (if publicized) as well as the freshness of its content. Then, you can reach out to the bloggers (using info found on the site or a “Contact Us” form) with an email that includes a description of the contest, a coded link to the landing page, a link to the stats page, and a link to a promo ad.

Remember your members

While these bloggers will hopefully drive new subscribers, don’t forget to let the current members of your virtual fan club enter as well. The contest deserves at least a mention in your email newsletter, Twitter feed, Facebook group, social networks, weekly coffee klatch, Pinochle tournaments, and any other place you regularly communicate with your most loyal customers. Not only are you deepening your relationship with existing customers, making it easy for them to pass the contest on to friends is another cost-effective, viral way to grow your list.

Rinse, wash, repeat

If you do not prevent multiple signups, you will have to scrub your list of duplicates. You may also want to remind new subscribers why they are receiving your email newsletter (“Thank you for entering our contest and signing up for…”). Include an easy way to unsubscribe, a must for the CAN-SPAM Act, since some may have focused more on your prize than the fact that they were also signing up for an email newsletter. This is also a way for your least motivated list members to self-select and get removed before too many of them hit the “SPAM” button and hinder your deliverability.

After you’ve counted all your new subscribers, look at your metrics to see what you could have done better. And then, start another contest with your newfound knowledge pushing you to even greater success.

For a real-world example of a marketer that used these tactics to grow a small email list to 20 times its previous size, turn to page 129 of the 2010 Email Marketing Benchmark Report. MarketingExperiments blog readers can receive a $100 discount.

And for a more in-depth look at making email and social media deliver for your bottom line, check out Email Summit ’10 in Miami from January 20-22. PLUS, Dr. Flint McGlaughlin will teach a Pre-Summit Live Email Optimization Workshop to help you maximize your email capture rate and quality. Register by January 8 to receive an early bird discount of $200.

Photo attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/idogcow/ / CC BY 2.0

Email Marketing, Internet Marketing Strategy, Marketing Insights, Research Topics clinic, email, Email Marketing, MarketingSherpa, viral marketing, webinar

Sending more than 1.2 billion emails per year is a significant marketing investment. And for one of our Research Partners, this effort raised several questions:

• When will their list get irritated?
• How many emails should be sent on a regular basis?
• At what point do emails start hurting sales?

To ensure they were getting the most value from their marketing spend, our Research Partner wanted definitive, data-driven answers. So we tested for the optimal frequency that will maximize total revenue. While our scientists now have the benefit of reams of information and know the answer to these questions, we thought it would be a fun challenge to your “marketer’s gut” to test your acumen and see if you could spot a winner based on sheer intuition (and yes, there is a prize).

Background: The Research Partner is a large ecommerce company that sells well-known, inexpensive, perishable products online (if we told you any more we’d have to kill you). They had a massive, yet varying email send rate and was emailing the house list anywhere from once a week to four times a week. Most of the Research Partner’s strategy was based on the offers available at the time. With such variance in frequency, we wondered if sending more email messages would have overly negative effects on unsubscribe rates. And likewise, we wondered how much impact sending fewer emails would have on revenue. Ultimately, we were looking for that optimal email-sending sweet spot.

Test Design: We took a small, highly-motivated segment of the Research Partner’s house list and used it as our testing sample. We then split that list into seven segments that would receive different send frequencies as represented below:

Segment 1: 1X PER MONTH

Segment 2: 2X PER MONTH

Segment 3: 3X PER MONTH

Segment 4: 4X PER MONTH

Segment 5: 6X PER MONTH

Segment 6: 10X PER MONTH

Segment 7: 15X PER MONTH

We monitored the effect of the send frequencies for 60 days. We tracked delivery, open rates, click-through, conversion, revenue, spam complaints, and unsubscribe rates throughout the duration test.

Results: Testing for optimal frequency assumes that revenue and unsubscribes will increase at a steady rate until the list gets irritated. At that point, revenue will experience diminishing returns and even decrease. Likewise, unsubscribe rates will increase at that point of irritation.

We wanted to test the validity of this assumption, as well as discover the optimal email frequency for this company’s email list that increased both total revenue and lifetime value of the customer.

But before we reveal the results from our scientists’ brains, we want to test your “marketing gut” with the following question (Oh, and just to spice things up a little, one person’s intuition will get them a free seat in one of our online certification courses – normally $595.):

1. What is the optimal monthly send frequency for this company?
   1. 1-2 per month
   2. 3-5 per month
   3. 6-9 per month
   4. 10-15 per month

Congratulations to Sharon Mostyn, winner of the Email Frequency Contest, and one of only a handful of correct responses. Sharon chose the Landing Page Optimization Course as her prize. Subscribe to the MarketingExperiments Journal to be notified when the web clinic replay and research brief are available so you can see the correct answer along with a full analysis of how this discovery can help you shape your email campaigns.

To enter the contest, leave your choice as a comment to this blog post along with your email address or Twitter handle (make sure you’re following @MktgExperiments so we can reach you). We will select a winner randomly from the correct responses (and yes there is a correct answer). The winner and results for this test will be announced live on Wednesday afternoon at 4 p.m. EST during our free web clinic – Optimize your Email in Three Steps: How one marketer tripled revenue from their house list.

Analytics & Testing, Clinic Notes, Email Marketing, General, Research Topics B2C, clinic, Ecommerce, Email Marketing, email optimization, marketing, optimization, retail, shopping, webinar

At our web clinics and optimization training workshops, two of the most frequent questions are: “What else can I test?” and “Do you have a good example?” MarketingExperiments research analysts provide practical test ideas and examples in the “What else can I test?” column.

According to the “2010 Media Planning Intelligence Study” from the Center for Media Research, email marketing is still the most preferred and effective way channel marketers have to communicate directly with their customers. It is also the preferred method of communication by consumers as well. In its Email Benchmark Guide 2009, MarketingSherpa reported that consumers overwhelmingly identify email as the ‘best way for companies to communicate with me’ (see survey results).

In this post, we are going to review several tactics you can consider to improve the look and feel of your emails and, in so doing, increase clickthrough rate. However, please remember that improving email response starts even before designing the layout and content of your email. It’s very important you look at how to increase qualified opt-ins, rate of deliverability, quality of rented list, etc. These are topics we will review in future posts. Improving the content and layout of your emails can give you quick a win. Also, if you start testing now, you can be ready for great a performing email template for the holiday season.

Note: most of the email examples I’m using are from ecommerce retailers, but the same principles apply to services or B2B emails.

Here are eight tactics that you can use or re-visit to increase your email clickthrough rate:

1) Analyze and segment your list. No matter when or how frequently you send emails, if they are not relevant, you will never achieve the highest possible response. A customer segmentation analysis will help you increase relevance by identifying the number of unique customer segments and their main product/service interest. With this information, you can not only target the content of your emails better, but also reduce the number of calls to action per email; preferably to only one call to action (see NextStage Evolution study results of ‘Raising clicks: Reduce the Number of Actions‘).

As an example, I can cite a recent case study from MarketingSherpa that explains how The American Greetings team got a 70% lift in conversions from a simple email test that matched subscribers’ preferences to content in the offer. In short, they started from zero by analyzing the lifecycle of their subscribers, type of ecards they sent, and type of senders they were. For St. Patrick’s Day, American Greetings team designed two versions of the email – one promoting a traditional St. Patrick’s Day e-card, the other promoting a humorous St. Patrick’s Day e-card. Conversions, in this case, were people who went to the site after seeing the email and purchased the e-card or a $15.99 annual subscription. See email designs below:

Funny St.Patrick's Day Email

Traditional St. Patrick's Day Email

FYI – If you are interested in reading more about segmentation analysis, here is a great article from iMedia with application examples: Email Segmentation for Success

2) Maintain continuity from subject line to headline to call to action. The role of the subject line is to either match a specific motivation of your customers or spark it. In any case, once they are motivated by your subject line, the role of your email is to maintain and strengthen that motivation. Therefore it is important to re-state or support the offer in the body and call to action. However, don’t go overboard with long copy. Remember that the goal of the email is to get a click, not to do the sale. Short copy and bullet points are usually all you need to support the offer. See ‘not this, but this’ examples:

Not this

But this

Or this

3) Use simple and vertical layouts. As mentioned before, try as much as possible to design your email body for one specific call to action. Secondary calls to actions and support links can be present in the email but they need to be clearly de-emphasized. Consider always an email template that guides the eye path from top (headline) to bottom (copy and call to action). The same principles that we recommend to landing pages apply to emails (see Optimizing Offer Pages). In case you have seen that presenting multiple offers works better with your target customers, then I recommend using a vertical layout; list offers in order of profitability for your business. Usually the first offer on the email is the one that will receive the most clicks. See examples:

Example 1

Example 2

Example 3

4) Make sure your CTA stands out. Although you can design emails to be clickable anywhere in the body, it helps if you drive customers’ attention to a specific call to action. The more you can guide your customers’ eye-path to certain action the better the chances they will perform that action. At the end it is all about reducing unsupervised thinking! See ‘not this, but this’ examples:

Not this	Not this
But this	Or this

5) Offer alternative-view options. In cases when images are blocked or customers are checking the email from their cell phones, it helps to present the offer with simple text links at the top of the email. Just adding clear, easy-to-follow text links can increase the opportunities for your customers to read and act on your emails. See ‘not this, but this’ examples:

Not this

But this

6) Try a PS note. A PS note is a great resource to complement the offer or add an additional incentive for customers to click. In terms of usability, PS notes are not only effective with those customers who were not sold initially and needed an additional push, but it is also effective with those customers who open the email and scan it from top to bottom to get a sense of what the whole email is about. When they scan from bottom up there is a chance they will act on the PS note of the email. See example:

Example

7) Leverage the footer for social media. We all want our customers to follow us in any way and everywhere. However, most of the time calls to action to become fan or followers are secondary goals on most email campaigns. The footer is a great place for secondary objectives like this one. The calls to action are not in the way of the main offer and do not compete with the primary call to action. See example:

Example

8 ) Advertise other products or present up/cross sells subtly. The same way visitors are used to identifying the left column of a web page as an advertising area, they identify the left column of an email or newsletter as another advertising area. As a result, the effectiveness of the advertising in your emails is minimal. Customers learn to automatically avoid this area. The most effective way to fight banner blindness is to place advertising in unusual places or use uncommon formats (atypical banner sizes and contextual text links instead of banners). See examples: (Amazon.com, 1-800-Flowers).

Example

Example 2

Let us know if you test any of these variations with your email campaigns and how they do. Also, feel free to share with us any other ideas that you have seen working really well.

Not sure what you should test next? Want to share your testing ideas, questions or feedback on this topic? Use the comments section below or tweet me at: @anagabydiaz

Email Marketing, General, Marketing Insights, Practical Application, Research Topics clickthrough rate, CTR, Ecommerce, email, Email Marketing, email optimization, marketing, optimization

At our Email Messaging Optimization Certification Workshop here in Miami, our team has crammed a few day’s worth of training into a single day-long certification session.

I have to admit, trying to cover and convey these proceedings really underscores some of the limitations of live blogging and Twitter. There’s a tangible energy in these live, interactive optimization workshops that consistently gets lost when we try to whittle down the session into our own 140-character tweets, or use live blogging.

Honestly, I’m not sure how to solve this. It’s like the difference between attending a live concert and hearing a :30 song preview from iTunes. The impact is nowhere near the same.

With that caveat on the table, while we’re working on the interviews and follow-ups that we’ll be posting here and in the MarketingExperiments Journal, you can find real-time bits and pieces from the workshop via the @MktgExperiments Twitter and updates to this blog post, as well as from our friends @BigMarketing and @MarketingSherpa.

A few takeaway points and quotes from the morning …

• When email list growth increases, revenue per name also typically increases due to higher level of engagement from new registrants.

• The #1 factor in success with your email capture: Are you getting the right names, not just more names?
• Specificity converts: Your offer needs to match the thought process going on in your prospects’ mind.
• Think of every email capture form as a mini landing page. Look at it that way and ask: is it offering an inevitable decision?
• If you’re only thinking about optimization in terms of the page elements, you’re missing the “why” questions that help you get to the root of the prospect’s thought process and needs.

UPDATE: More principles and points to ponder …

• When using incentives, the incentive needs to be clearly understood on its own; when the two offers (the primary and incentive) are conflated, conversion rate will suffer.

• Friction and anxiety are different. You should not try to fix or over-correct for them in the same way.
• Value proposition and benefits need to be communicated — but many pages start from the point of assuming visitors already know more than they do, and they try to cram in too much from there.
• We’re seeing many pages that try to attract and convert repeat visitors in the same way as new visitors.
• As marketers, we need to stop thinking in terms of a target audience; we’re dealing with real human beings with wants, needs, and problems they’re trying to solve.
• Many of us are concerned about our ability (or inability) as copywriters to persuade prospects to take action; the truth is, clarity trumps persuasion. Heard that one before?

UPDATE 3/16:

Get more of your live Tweet fixes from Email Summit:

• @ellieeille

• Tamara Gielen
• #emailsummit tweetstream

UPDATE 3/23-25:

More Workshop and Summit follow-ups from …

Our friends over at Sherpa: Email Summit Wrap-Up Report: 8 Takeaways on Segmentation, Triggered Campaigns, Web 2.0 Integration and More

And HubSpot: Interruption Marketing Incites Anxiety; Inbound Marketing Builds Trust

And AWeber: Increase Profit 2300% and Other Key Takeaways From MarketingSherpa’s Email Summit

And Blue Sky Factory: MarketingSherpa’s Email Summit 09: Top 3 Takeaways

Photo: (le)doo (is alive)

Want to share your thoughts? Got some Flickr photos to share? Try the comments field, or better yet, follow us here: @MktgExperiments, or check the tweetstream.

Email Marketing, Internet Marketing Strategy, Marketing Insights email, landing page optimization, marketing, optimization, workshops