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

In last year’s wrap-up on the MarketingExperiments blog, Daniel Burstein, Director of Editorial Content, MECLABS, and Paul Cheney, Editorial Analyst, MECLABS, shared the most-tweeted articles from 2011.

This year, Daniel and Paul have been gracious enough to hand me the reigns for our year-end review, and I decided to do something a little different …

Today’s MarketingExperiments blog post is crammed full of the posts and Web clinics you found most helpful over the last year.

And if that isn’t enough, we’re sprinkling in a few extra posts that some of the MarketingExperiments contributors selected as recommended reads in case you missed them.

Our goal for putting this massive amount of content into one location is that it will hopefully serve you as a quick reference guide that aids your testing and optimization efforts in the year ahead.

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I could have made the title of this blog post, “Subject Line Testing: How we achieved a 48% lift from a split test.”

That is the challenge you face with your subject lines, as well. Should you make a promise? Or should you intrigue your audience? This is a perfect opportunity for you to do a little A/B testing and to see what resonates most … which we did recently for a MarketingExperiments Web clinic invite.

This was a single variable, A/B/C split test, with the only variable being the subject line. One “promise” subject line was tested against two “intrigue” subject lines.

TREATMENTS

“We created two subject lines that were intrigue based. One was a question, and one was more of an intriguing statement,” said Paul Cheney, Editorial Analyst, MECLABS.  “We wanted to narrow down what makes people more intrigued. Is it more of a question or more of a statement?”

Subject Line Treatment A (promise) – How to Effectively Use Color on a Website

Subject Line Treatment B (intrigue) – Are Your Website Colors Hurting Conversion?

Subject Line Treatment C (intrigue) – 5 Horrifying Mistakes Designers Make With Color

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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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We surveyed 2,735 marketers for the 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, and asked them which email marketing elements they test most often …

Q. Which of the following email campaign elements do you routinely test to optimize performance? 

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In a recent Web clinic planning meeting, Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director and CEO, MECLABS, discussed some elements that determine how effective a subject line is …

In Wednesday’s free Web clinic, “Subject Lines Tested: How to write subject lines that double your clickthrough rate,” Flint will cover all four elements that can help you determine the effectiveness of your subject lines.

Plus, we’ll review the results of the subject line test the MarketingExperiments blog audience participated in, and see what greater lessons can be learned from the results.

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