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

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…

I recently attended the MarketingSherpa Email Marketing LEAPS Advanced Practices Workshop in Boston and, though these events are always good for new information, I found myself surprised – and even outright alarmed – by one particular statistic cited at the beginning of the event: 61% of companies do not routinely test their email campaigns.

Sixty-one percent. See for yourself:
Read more…

“She was here on earth to make sense of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name.” – Boris Pasternak (Doctor Zhivago)

Sometimes, as marketers, this is one of our biggest challenges. We must make sense of the “wild enchantment” inherent in our audience so we can call each offering we have by its right name. After all, the way we think about our products can be vastly different from the way our audience thinks about them. This is why specific words matter, and for more than just SEO.

Let’s take a look at a recent test conducted by MarketingSherpa (sister company to MarketingExperiments), to determine which words best tap into the audience’s motivations. Read more…

One of the most enjoyable parts of being a MECLABS employee is seeing tests performed for a wide variety of companies and organizations. From international conglomerates to regional mom and pops, we always welcome new opportunities to test, learn and share for the betterment of the marketing community.

[End shameless self-promotion]

However, while looking far and wide, there are often some very interesting things going on right under our noses. For example, when our sister company, MarketingSherpa, let us know they’d be trying something new with a promotional email for an upcoming event, we put away our passports and paid closer attention. Read more…

Some of my favorite tweets on #SherpaLPO (the hashtag for Optimization Summit in Atlanta) reflect the stark difference between evidence-based marketing and “song and dance” marketing…

Landed safe and sound in Atlanta, ready to nerd it up tomorrow with fellow website optimizers #SherpaLPO http://ow.ly/57ghH

– @DesignerMeg

Getting ready to geek out with @MarkKilens and @mgieva at #SherpaLPO

– @mcdmiller

To use a high school analogy, marketers are often thought of as the popular people – the Student Government president, the captain of the football team (or perhaps curling team for our Canadian friends).

But the 139 marketers listening to Dr. Flint McGlaughlin teach right now in our pre-Optimization Summit Landing Page Optimization Workshop in Atlanta (the next stops of this workshop will be in New York and San Francisco) are not seeking to learn about better ways to add a winning smile or flashy move to their marketing campaigns.

Evidence-based marketers are a little different. They are the chess club president or captain of the academic team (don’t worry, popularity comes when you start marketing based on business intelligence, instead of just intuition, and your campaigns produce results). 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…