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

On the MarketingExperiments blog, we often share tests we conduct with Research Partners. Today’s post was run on our own marketing campaign.

The team tested a promotional email for the MarketingSherpa 2012 Mobile Marketing Benchmark Report.

CONTROL

Subject Line: [Just Released] New Mobile Marketing Benchmark Report 

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The control featured general copy about using mobile in your 2013 marketing strategy and what tactics are working for mobile.

After evaluating the control, the team hypothesized the email did not have information about the insights prospective customers will receive from reading this benchmark report.

From that analysis, the team crafted …

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In the MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Benchmark Report, 79% of marketers found delivering highly relevant content to be an either somewhat or very significant challenge.

When you break down email relevancy to its core components, it is essentially a combination of:

• Getting the right message …
• To the right person …
• At the right time.

While we often write about email messaging on the MarketingExperiments blog, today we’ll focus on that last element of relevancy – timing – in the following experiment with a MECLABS Research Partner …

EXPERIMENT

Background:  A large financial institution offering a financial service requiring an application to consumers

Goal:  To increase the number of completed applications

Primary Research Question:  Of the send times tested, which time will result in the highest rate of completed applications from delivered emails?

“We conducted some research on the best times to send email, and the test was intended to see when current customers were more likely to complete an action,” said Ashley Hanania, Senior Research Manager, MECLABS.

EXPERIMENT DESIGN

The test had a total of 14 treatment paths. Each path had the same subject line, email body copy and design.

The only treatment value that was tested was send time. Two emails were sent each day of the week, one at 3:00 a.m. EST and one at 3:00 p.m. EST. The recipients were all in U.S. time zones.

“We tested 3 a.m. EST because the email would be first in your inbox, regardless of where you lived,” Ashley said. “This was also taken into consideration for the 3 p.m. EST send, because every recipient would be in the same mindset, afternoon work/weekend activities, as opposed to a 6 p.m. EST send, where the East Coast would be making their commute back home and the West Coast would still be at work.”

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Do you know the optimal time to send your next marketing email?

Should you send it on a weekday or during the weekend? Will a morning send perform higher than a send in the evening?

Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS, will share our email timing discoveries in our next free Web clinic – “Email Timing Tested: How one of the largest banks in the world determined the best time to send an email.”

First, we wanted to hear from you …

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In the MECLABS editorial content department, our goal is to help you do your job better. One way we can do that is by answering your questions. And for tomorrow’s MarketingSherpa webinar (sponsored by ReturnPath) – “Email Marketing: 3 Tips for Producing Engaging Email Content” – we have received a plethora of questions.

While Courtney Eckerle, Reporter, MECLABS, and I will try to answer as many of your questions as possible in the hour-long webinar, I wanted to answer a few testing-related questions in today’s MarketingExperiments blog post, as well …

Looking for tips on appropriate subject line and message length – my emails all tend to be too LONG! We’re in B2B sending emails to HR professionals.

My biggest question back to you is … how do you know they’re too long? Essentially, how do you know they are not the optimal length?

I would suggest testing subject line and message length with your audience. The results might surprise you.

For example, we found in an email test to a B2B audience where the longer subject line actually generated 8.2% more opens than the shorter subject line.

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What started as a little humor added to a reminder email about an upcoming split test became a learning experience on testing value proposition and discovering opportunities for optimization.

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In today’s MarketingExperiments blog post, we’ll share the results of our experiment and what we learned from putting these contenders to the test.

First, let’s get a little background on the test design.

The idea for this test came from a brainstorming session between Paul Cheney, Editorial Analyst, MECLABS, and Austin McCraw, Senior Editorial Analyst, MECLABS. The goal for Paul and Austin was to discover which segments of the value proposition for MarketingExperiments Web clinics have the greatest appeal and where opportunities for optimization exist.

They used a Web clinic invite email to run their subject line test. The research question was, “Which email subject line will get the highest open rate?”

When I asked Paul why they chose a subject line test instead of a split test of the title, he explained that a subject line test allowed them to test their hypothesis and keep the Web clinic title congruent.

“Because we couldn’t exactly change the title of a live event while we were trying to promote it, we needed a subtler way of testing the hypothesis. An email subject line was perfect because it has the same effect of a headline, but we didn’t need to change the title of the clinic,” Paul said.

Below is a screenshot of the Web clinic invite used for the test. All of the copy, images and the call-to-action were kept identical for both the control and the treatment.

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I heard this little rumor that there are countries other than the good ol’ US of A. As an American, I found this a little hard to believe, so we did some testing.

In all seriousness, I want to share a test we recently ran, along with what we learned that might help your email and webinar efforts (skip to the end for lessons learned).

It all started with some feedback we recently received …

Dear friends,

A little help from an European friend:

I have joined your webinar.

If you like more customers outside US, you should know that we have 2 difficulties by signing up: Your 12 hour system – but that’s pretty easy – and your time zone EDT. I can find a time zone converter on the Internet, but why should I?

Use EDT for your US customers and GMT or UTC for the rest of the world. This way you may get a market several hundred percent larger. This is a common error by US companies, just like not putting the country code in front of phone numbers. The world is outside [the] US

Best regards,

Bjarne R.

We wanted to see if we could add the international time without increasing friction for our American audience. To the split test!

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