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

Over at MarketingExperiments’ sister company, we’re accepting entries for MarketingSherpa’s 6th Annual Email Marketing Awards. We’ve added a new category this year: best innovation. I’m really looking forward to seeing the latest ideas marketers have cooked up.

One new tactic we’ve seen this year is the integration of social media and email. And Facebook just launched the mother-of-all mashups between these two channels: Facebook Messages. Read more…

(Editor’s Note: Marketing strategist and best-selling author, David Meerman Scott, will be the keynote speaker at our sister company’s MarketingSherpa Email Summit ’11 in January and every attendee will get a copy of his new book, “Real-Time Marketing & PR.” So we invited David to add his thoughts to the blog about email marketing. Here’s what he had to say…)

I travel all over the world, speaking to business audiences about Real-Time Marketing. That means I stay in a heck of a lot of hotels—40 or more a year. And because I do my own reservations online, I’m in an excellent position to observe how hotels communicate with customers via email after reservations are made.

This is a perfect example of an industry that screws up email marketing. The reason? Emails are sent on the hotel’s timeframe, not the customers. And it doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, the rules of real-time apply to you too.

Nearly all hotels send confirmation by e-mail soon after the booking is made. And a few send reminders a week or so before check-in. Typically, that’s all I get before a stay.

Read more…

Email marketing is a very popular topic and most likely you’ve read a number of articles covering different ways to improve email marketing campaigns. Whether you are an experienced pro, or relatively new to the subject, it never hurts to review the basics and think about the process of email marketing optimization from the building blocks on up. I recently joined MarketingSherpa as a reporter and I’ve been taking the online certification and training courses offered by MarketingExperiments. A couple of weeks ago I had a popular post at the MarketingSherpa blog on email marketing optimization, looking at the process through the lens of email capture. This week I’m covering email messaging, the heart of email marketing. Read more…

Editor’s Note: In a recent interview with MarketingSherpa Editor Sean Donahue, Research Analyst Corey Trent outlined errors even experienced email marketers make when conducting tests. (My personal favorite – #5). We thought this information was valuable, and wanted to share it right here on the blog for those who do not have a MarketingSherpa membership. Special thanks to our sister company for allowing us to republish the below article…

SUMMARY: Before you conduct your next email test, make sure you’re not falling into a trap that can muddy your results or limit the gains you might otherwise achieve.

We spoke with an email testing expert from our sister company, MarketingExperiments, to uncover common mistakes marketers make when running email tests. Read why good analytics and segmentation are crucial forerunners to testing, and why a blockbuster discovery from one test actually can be a risky thing for a marketing team.

by Sean Donahue, Editor, MarketingSherpa

Testing is an essential component of a strong email marketing strategy. But only if the tests are conducted and analyzed properly to ensure you’re helping – not hurting – your email performance.

“There is a cost for bad testing,” says Corey Trent, Research Analyst, MarketingExperiments. “Bad assumptions based on bad tests can cost you a lot of money and cause you to lose out on a lot of business.”

Trent routinely conducts email tests as a member of the MarketingExperiments sales and marketing optimization research team. Through this work, he’s seen how mistakes, misconceptions and simple oversights can derail a well-meaning marketer’s testing strategy.

We asked him to share his advice for avoiding testing pitfalls, so you can achieve your goal of improving email performance. Here are seven common mistakes he’s observed: Read more…

Email testing produces some of the most interesting results I see here at MarketingExperiments. The cause for this is a combination of constantly changing variables.

For one, content within email tends to change more often than your typical landing page. This makes optimizing for content more challenging as different topics are likely to garner different levels of interest from the segments within your email list. So results will change each month based on the content alone – making A/B testing the only reliable method for measuring progress.

In addition, email lists themselves prove to be a challenge, as what works for one list may not work for another list. Even within lists, especially aggregated lists, you will see different results based on the value proposition, content, layout, and calls-to-action (CTAs) used in your email.

And to further complicate matters, you are still dealing with a funnel process in which your email must first reach a user (avoiding spam filters, personal filters, etc.), your subject line must interest the user enough to open the email, your email must display properly (with images on and off) and be compelling enough to achieve a click-through to your landing page where the battle for a conversion wages on.

In today’s world of overloaded email boxes, people declaring email bankruptcy, spam filters and everything else, this game is only getting more difficult – for marketers and users alike.

With that said, I’d like to offer up my own favorite email testing tricks and tips. It’s important to understand that what works for one segment, list, or industry will not necessarily work for another. In fact what works one month for a list may not work next month. It’s an ever-evolving process in which you must always challenge your own best practices to maximize your results. Read more…

It’s a little over-simplified, but an email marketer’s job is to get the right message to the right person at the right time to achieve a specific goal. Doing that means understanding what motivates subscribers to open a message and engage with your offer – and that’s where the process gets tricky.

Like our colleagues at MarketingExperiments, we at MarketingSherpa believe that nothing provides the better insights into the “right” approach than a good test. A marketer’s personal bias, best guess, gut instinct or assumptions aren’t enough. In fact, they’re often wrong. You have to be willing to let your audience SHOW you what motivates them.

Today in Munich, MarketingSherpa is hosting its second Germany Email Marketing Summit, which features a Case Study that demonstrates the power of testing to determine customer motivation. VNR.de, a publisher of lifestyle and professional advice from experts in their fields, is sharing the results of a list-cleansing/subscriber reactivation campaign they recently conducted.

Winning back “inactive” subscribers Read more…