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

“No one wakes up in the morning and says, ‘I sure hope I get a lot of great email marketing messages today.’” This was one of  Dr. Flint McGlaughlin’s more clever quips at our recent B2B Summit.

And it hits close to home, because we all know how hard it is to get attention in those crowded inboxes, where your recipients are quickly sorting through messages mostly focused on deleting and unsubscribing, not diligently reading every word of your marketing messages.

This Wednesday at 4 p.m., Flint, our managing director, will share some of our discoveries about increasing response to email marketing promotions and campaigns in our next free Web clinic – Email Messaging: How overcoming 3 common errors increased clickthrough 104%.

But first, we wanted to hear your peers’ top tips for increasing the effectiveness of email messaging. Here are a few of our favorite responses …

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Nothing can be assumed when you’re sending an email. You cannot assume recipients know where to click. You cannot assume they realize that the landing page and the email are connected. When you make these assumptions, you’re really hoping the audience will “figure it out.”

But your audience does not want to “figure it out.” Sure, some of them will get it. But others will not realize your image is hyperlinked. Or they will not realize they are on the right landing page, and will leave instead. To avoid this, eliminate what Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS, calls “unsupervised thinking.”

This phrase came to mind repeatedly during the Actionable Design Insights session at ExactTarget Connections 2011. After teaching our Email Marketing LEAPS Advanced Practices Workshop earlier in the week at Connections, I sat in the audience on Wednesday to hear best practice advice from Kristina Huffman, Sr. Design Consultant at ExactTarget, and real marketing examples from Laura Schraeder, Email Marketing Specialist at Helzberg Diamonds.

Below are just a few of the many takeaways on email design highlighted during the session: Read more…

Most marketers are afraid to use the word “FREE” (especially in all caps) in their emails because they’ve heard it tends to trigger spam filters. When that happens, it’s generally a bad thing as less of your emails get read. No emails getting read means no offers being viewed. That’s BAD. Right?

Well as the Junior Editorial Analyst here at MECLABS, MarketingExperiments’ parent company, I’m charged with sending out emails to our MarketingExperiments list of about 100,000 marketers around the globe. That means I also get to test just about anything I want in an email to probably most of the people reading this blog post.

Because of the hot debate around this issue, I knew I wanted to test the word “FREE” in an email to see what it did.
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Brad Bortone recently wrote a blog post regarding one of the surprising findings from the MarketingSherpa 2011 Email Marketing Benchmark Report – that 61% of marketers do not routinely test email campaigns to optimize performance.

Yes, as a member of the MECLABS team, a place where woven into the fabric of the corporate culture is testing and optimization, the news is disappointing. However, I can’t say it is surprising. Marketers today have more responsibilities and less time to accomplish their objectives, making it easy to overlook the benefits of testing.
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A nonprofit organization with which I have no prior experience called me several times last week to solicit donations. Despite having explained that, no, my name is not Mr. Allen, and no, I am not interested in donating, they continued to call.

These phone calls were the email marketing equivalent to batch-and-blast emails. They were spam with irrelevant and poorly targeted messages. I wish my phone had a “junk” button.

The caller’s strong-armed script and continued pestering have persuaded me, but in the wrong direction. I will never donate to this organization. Its marketers have shown a complete lack of respect for:

• My name
• My interests
• My requests
• My time (the calls came during work)

Had these calls been emails, I would have deleted the first and marked the rest as spam. Many other people would have done the same — which is why email relevance is so important. Read more…

We usually share tests on this blog that our optimization research analysts conduct in our labs with our Research Partners. Sometimes we share tests from our audience is well, but rarely do we share our own tests.

In today’s blog post I wanted to share a recent email test from our own marketing team. Not because the results were impressive. If you’ve followed MarketingExperiments for any time, you’ve certainly seen us share results from 162% lifts and 59% gains. Today, we’re going to discuss what to do when you get something entirely different. Read more…