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

Email design always proves to be a hot topic with marketers. And when you have top agencies competing against each other, the fire just gets hotter as we learned during last week’s live web clinic – Maximize your Agency ROI: How adding science to the creative process reveals a 26% gain.

We received a plethora of questions, most which we could did not have time to address during the hour-long clinic. So, as with every Web Clinic Extra, we have picked a handful of the most common questions to address here on our blog. This week we pulled in Andy Mott, the Senior Manager of Research Partnerships, to answer these questions…

Email marketing is a topic that comes up often in the MarketingExperiments community. In fact, Dr. Flint McGlaughlin is delivering a keynote today at Em@il Summit ’10 in Miami as well as teaching a pre-summit Live Email Optimization Workshop. If you couldn’t make it out there this year to get valuable insights from your peers and industry leaders, come back to the blog on Friday for some key takeaways from this year’s summit.

You can view a replay of the clinic or read the latest issue of MarketingExperiments Journal. Our next live web clinic, The Five Best Ways to Optimize Email Response (Part 2): How to craft effective email messages that drive your customers to action, will be taught on February 3rd from 4 to 5 p.m. EST.

Clinic Notes, Email Marketing, Marketing Q&A

During our December 2 web clinic, Optimize your Email in Three Steps, Boris Grinkot, Heather Andruk, and Corey Trent answered questions from our audience about email relevance, frequency, and metrics.

We often don’t have time to answer all of our audience questions on the live web clinics. So we distilled all the questions into a few representative queries, and pulled Heath Andruk and Corey Trent in from the lab to share their insights on the latest edition of Web Clinic Extra:

Corey and Heather answered these questions:

Question 1 (1:05): In the frequency experiment shown on the clinic, was there variation in the types of emails (i.e. reminders, offers) in the low frequency email group (i.e. 1-4 per month) like there were in the higher frequency group?

Question 2 (1:45): What are some factors to determine good segments?

Question 3 (2:40): What do you do if you cannot segment?

Question 4 (5:00): Is there one age group more tolerable to frequent emails than others?

Question 5 (6:40): How do you figure out the best timing for emails?

Question 6 (9:55): Can you track goal pages that are outside of your domain with Google Analytics?

Question 7 (10:55): Can you track an email campaign in Google Analytics if you are sending emails with a 3rd party provider?

Come back to the blog on Friday for a technical addendum from Corey Trent. He has some specific tips to help you put his metrics wizardry into revenue-generating practice for your email campaigns.

The complete Flash version of the web clinic, along with a downloadable research brief (PDF), are now available on MarketingExperiments.com. If you have additional questions, use the comments section below or post them to our MarketingExperiments Optimization group.

Clinic Notes, Email Marketing, General, Marketing Q&A, Research Topics

During our November 11 web clinic, Surprising Wins from 2009: Using insights from an uncertain economy to drive 302% growth, Boris Grinkot, Adam Lapp, and Paul Clowe answered questions from our audience on a range of topics pertinent to our research from this year.

We often don’t have time to answer all the questions from our international audience on the live web clinics. So we’re launching a new feature on the blog – Web Clinic Extra. We distilled the best questions and posed them to Researchers Boris Grinkot and Adam Lapp for our first episode:

The complete Flash version of the web clinic, along with a downloadable research brief (PDF), are now available on MarketingExperiments.com. If you have additional questions, use the comments section below or post them to our MarketingExperiments Optimization group.

Clinic Notes, Marketing Q&A