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

Editor’s Note: The MarketingExperiments community is an interactive group with a great deal of questions and answers between marketers and their peers as well as with the MarketingExperiments staff. Occasionally we publish these interactions on the blog when we think there is a particularly good question that our readers can benefit from…

QUESTION:

I recently watched The Five Best Ways to Optimise Email Response seminar by Dr Flint McGlaughlin. I found it extremely enlightening and it provided a lot of food for thought. However, I have a quick question with regards to slide no. 22.

I appreciate your time and I’m sure you receive plenty of mailings of this nature; therefore I will get straight to the point.

In this slide, the recommendation is to change the subject line of the mailing from “Thank You For Making Us Your Florist Of Choice” to “15% Off – Our Way Of Saying Thank You!”

I understand why the wording would be changed to make it more endearing to the receiver but I wondered if the symbols added would increase the risk of the mailing being filtered and more inclined to be highlighted as spam – therefore reducing the success of the mailing.

In my experience I steer clear of any symbols in the subject line when sending large mail shots, especially %, ! and £. Am I being too cautious?

Kind regards,

Chris, BA(hons) Business & Marketing
Marketing
London

ANSWER:

Hi, Chris. Thanks for your question.

If I might broaden the question slightly to interpret its essence as a transferrable principle, could I restate it as…

How much validity is there to the conventional wisdom that, in the Subject Line of an offer email message, numbers, certain symbols (especially £/€/$, %, and !) and “SPAM words” such as “Free” and “discount” will cause a dramatic reduction in deliverability, and consequently effectiveness?

… if so, then it’s surely an important one.

In the case of the particular company and study referred to on Slide 22 – that was precisely one of the questions we set out to answer.

What you couldn’t see in the context of Dr. McGlaughlin’s presentation at the MarketingSherpa Email Summit in Miami is that this particular two-treatment comparative vignette was just a tiny part of a much larger and broader study. We intended to test the specific, widely accepted presumption you mentioned.

We were also exploring a host of other best practices to see how valid they remained through the evolution of regulations as well technical filter changes by email service providers (ESPs) since the time they were first introduced and anecdotally adopted (around 2003-2005).

This was important because we know from our foundational Offer/Response-Optimization principles of “clarity trumps persuasion” and “specificity converts,” that the clearer and more specific subject line – i.e., the one with the “15% Off…” copy – should convert better.

What we found was that there was, in fact, a small but significant difference in deliverability – interestingly, it was more pronounced among the smaller ESPs. In addition, as we had predicted based on the “eme” heuristic, the Open Rate actually declined (…by more than 25%).

In the end, though, the central research question was “Which email subject line will result in the greatest projected net revenue?” As revealed in Dr. McGlaughlin’s presentation, despite the slight dip in Delivery Rate, and the (what would otherwise have been alarming) drop in Open Rate, the Click-through Rate (CTR) to the landing page was 60.3% higher.

What he may not have mentioned is that, in direct answer to the research question, the Treatment subject line yielded a 56% increase in projected net revenue vs. the Control.

So, while it appears there is still at least some validity to the commonly held belief that special characters in the email Subject Line reduces deliverability, our research (this experiment plus two others conducted with different products and industries) suggests that when they serve to do so, these negative factors are dwarfed by the power of clarity.

I hope that’s helpful, Chris.

All the best,

Bob Kemper
Director of Sciences
MECLABS Group, LLC

Dr. McGlaughlin will next be teaching and speaking about email marketing at MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Germany 2010 in Munich on March 8^th and 9^th.

Dr. McGlaughlin’s four-hour workshop and keynote presentation will cover email capture rate and quality, open rates, conversion, and building customer trust and loyalty with email. He will also be conducting live optimization of audience submissions – a lively and always-popular segment.

Email Marketing, Research Topics 2010 Email Summit, clinic, email, Email Marketing, email optimization, webinar

To wrap up our email response optimization trilogy, today’s free web clinic will focus on live optimization of audience-submitted emails.

Our roundtable of research analysts will use your peers’ email messages to share transferable principles that you can use to improve the ROI of your email sends. To give you a firm understanding about what the MarketingExperiments methodologies are based on, we’ll begin the clinic with the below experiment.

As always on web clinic day, we’re giving you an opportunity to use your experience and intuition to see if you can guess which treatment won…

Background: An established financial institution offering online savings accounts

Test Design: This was an A/B/C/D multi-factorial test that pitted three treatments against the control. While we also split traffic between different landing pages to test which combination produced the highest conversion rate, today we’ll focus on which email increased click-through rate. Here are the email versions (out of courtesy to the Research Partner, we have anonymized these email messages):

(click to zoom in)

Control

Treatment 1

Treatment 2

Treatment 3

Results: Before we reveal the results, here’s a chance to test your own marketing intuition and be regarded as an online marketing leader! Use the comments section to let us know which email message you think delivered the highest click-through rate.

Which email generated the highest click-through?

* Control
* Treatment 1
* Treatment 2
* Treatment 3

We’ll post the name of the marketer who guessed the winning email and came closest to the click-through rate gain, so make sure to include your name, title, company, Twitter handle or any other info you would like to include.

The winner and results for this experiment will also be announced live this afternoon at 4 p.m. EST during our free web clinic – The Five Best Ways to Optimize Email Response (Part 3): Special live optimization web clinic.

Congratulations to Stefanie Kelly of Pathway Medical Staffing, the only marketer with the intuition to guess what our tests have confirmed – Treatment 1 delivered the highest click-through rate.

This copy-rich email outperformed the control by 42% by synchronizing to the decision patterns of the recipient through a commonality of language. This email carries a very personal feel and is crafted to capture the recipients’ attention and convince them to click through to the landing page.

Analytics & Testing, Clinic Notes, Email Marketing, Research Topics clinic, email, Email Marketing, email optimization, marketing, optimization, webinar

This weekend I was paying for the 10 gallons I had just put into my old 1997 Honda Civic, when I decided that I’d purchase a nice cold soda for the road. I pointed out the pump where my fueled-up car was located and then slid the cold beverage to the convenience store clerk. He informed me that my total came to $25.89 and then he stopped.

Looking me dead in the eyes, he asked me what my name was. “Austin,” I replied a little hesitantly. “Austin, are you sure you want to spend $25.89 for 10 gallons of gas and a cold soda?” he asked. I nodded and attempted to hand him my Visa credit card.

He denied my overture and informed me that he could only help me if I were a member of his store. So not wanting to cause a scene with the five people who were now behind me, I conceded.

Can I just buy a soda?

He asked for my name again, and then moved on to more personal information. He informed me that my phone number, home address, and email address were all required for membership, but then gave me the option of telling him my age, date of birth, marital status, and household income level.

I, of course, declined. After all the information had been gathered, the clerk then passed me about 60 pages of the legal terms which I needed to sign to become a member.

Finally he took my card. However, in the middle of processing it, another clerk approached me saying that he noticed I was purchasing a can of soda. The coworker then made some suggestions concerning what I might like to buy along with my soda based upon previous customer patterns.

Once I had assured his coworker that I just wanted a soda, the clerk then again reminded me that my total came to $25.89 and again stopped, looked me dead in the eyes and asked, “Austin, are you sure you want to spend $25.89 for 10 gallons of gas and a cold soda?”

This might be how customers see our shopping carts

Ok, so this story is a bit of a stretch for a convenience store, but is an accurate reenactment of the experience at many ecommerce sites. This is exactly what we see across the Web with shopping cart experiences everywhere. In fact, we recently ran a test with one of our Research Partners and here is what the original checkout process looked like:

1)     Product page (click to purchase)

2)     Cart page (confirm you are ready to order)

3)     User account page (if you are new you must choose to create a new account)

4)     Create a user account page #1 (enter name, email and account password)

5)     Create a user account page #2 (enter shipping information)

6)     Create a user account page #3 (enter payment information)

7)     Order confirmation page (confirm order and account information again)

8)     Receipt page

To go from the product page to the receipt page took eight different steps. A customer has to register before being able to place the order, as well as confirm that order twice. After reorganizing and removing unnecessary steps, we were able to optimize this process to a single basic step. The increase in order completions was over 68%.

Is your shopping cart trying to do too much?

What this experiment illustrates is something we see over and over in the shopping cart process. Most shopping carts that companies use are bulky and have more features than needed (i.e. cart registration, order confirmations, cross-promotional offerings, etc.). Sometimes this means a shopping cart looks less like a basic transaction facilitator, and more like a boot camp obstacle training course with high walls and flaming hoops.

For instance, how many times have you had to join a web site before actually buying a product? How many “if you like this product, you might like this product” offers have you endured while checking out? Have you ever counted how many times you actually have to confirm your order before it goes through?

None of these features are bad per se, and some might even be helpful in the overall customer-client relationship. The only problem is when they get in the way of the natural thought sequence of a customer looking to purchase something at a specific moment in time.

Please, just let me out of here!

If I come to a web site, place an order in my cart, and hit “check out,” then please just let me check out. We must make sure our cart processes is sticking to the main objective – namely, closing the sale.

All these customer retention features and cross-promotional options can be strategically accomplished after the initial sale has already been completed. For instance, you can ask for the customer to create an account for future purchases or send them to a thank-you page that has cross-promotional offers.

Overall, this experiment leaves us with one key question: How many people might we be losing in the process by interrupting their order process? For this company, simplifying the checkout process meant 68% more orders. What is your potential?

Want to learn more?

For more information on how to optimize your shopping cart process, listen to our good friend Joel Book, the Director of eMarketing Education at ExactTarget and Charles Nicholls, the Founder of SeeWhy, in the free webinar entitled The 7 Secrets To Recovering Abandoned Shopping Carts.

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rickharris/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Ecommerce, Order Process, Research Topics eccomerce, Ecommerce, marketing, shopping cart abandonment, shopping carts, webinar

Do you shout, brag, or sell in the typical conversations you have in an average day?

If you’re not a professional wrestler, you will likely answer “no” to the above question. Yet, as Dr. Flint McGlaughlin showed in our live web clinic on February 3, many marketing email messages fall into the above traps because they don’t think of email marketing as just a conversation…

And like any good conversation, a few elements are key – clarity, proper timing, a common language, and a focus on how the person you’re talking to hears what you’re saying. Combine these elements with a methodology that allows you to optimize each part in a real-world, feedback-intensive setting, and you’ve mastered the basics of email marketing.

And do it all in a radically honest way – talk to your customers like a person, not like the typical marketer. In the end, being direct is the best way to earn the trust of a skeptical customer.

Dr. McGlaughlin ended this web clinic with live optimization of audience-submitted email messages. This last segment was so popular that we’ve decided to add a part three to our series on email response optimization that focuses exclusively on live optimization.

Dr. McGlaughlin will next be teaching live during a free webinar with our sister company InTouch – Online Lead Generation: How to optimize forms to convert “window shoppers” into leads – on Wednesday, February 17, 2010 at 2pm EST.

Clinic Notes, Email Marketing, Marketing Insights, Research Topics clinic, Email Marketing, email optimization, Flint McGlaughlin, marketing, marketing research, web clinic, webinar

How much will companies spend on email marketing this year? According to Forrester, that number is well over one billion dollars. And still email designs are being sent out without any clue as to how well they perform. It is not uncommon to see the “most beautiful” email messages that follow all the “best-practice” guidelines and have a committee of “design experts” backing them underperform – as if spending more than a billion dollars wasn’t enough!

So we want to see if you can tell the difference. We ran an experiment with three top-of-the-line agency-designed email messages. We want to know if you can spot the email design that performed best. (A prize for all the winners this time)

Background: This email test ran for Pier 1 Imports, which I will assume most of you know is a large B2C company selling home products. This email in particular was a seasonal promotion going to a segment of their house list. There are three agency-designed email messages (Treatments 1-3) being tested against Pier 1’s baseline version (Control).

Test Design: This was a simple A/B/C/D multi-factorial test. While we also measured open rate and conversion rate, the objective was to increase the clickthrough rate. Here are the page versions (click to zoom in):

Control                                              Treatment 1

Treatment 2                                      Treatment 3

Results: So now that you understand the experiment background and have seen the treatments, can you spot which email performed the best? Before we reveal the results, here’s a chance to test your own marketing intuition and be regarded as a world-renowned marketing leader!

1. Which email generated the highest clickthrough?

• Control
• Treatment 1
• Treatment 2
• Treatment 3

UPDATE: Surprise! The Control was the winner. Each of the agency-designed treatments underperformed the original (one of which decreased clickthrough by 52%). Congratulations to Ben, the only correct response we received before we announced the results on yesterday’s web clinic. You can follow Ben on twitter at @findingforrest. Also, subscribe to the MarketingExperiments Journal to be notified when the web clinic replay and research brief are available so you can see the correct answer, the results of the control and treatments, and how these experiments can help you shape your own marketing campaigns.

Clinic Notes, Email Marketing, General, Research Topics clinic, email, Email Marketing, email optimization, marketing, optimization, webinar

“Be sincere, be brief, be seated.” While some experts have dutifully penned entire tomes about this subject, the famous advice Franklin Roosevelt gave to his son about public speaking still resonates today for its stark honesty.

If Franklin Roosevelt 2.0 was giving advice about Internet marketing, he would probably change “brief” to “clear” (and perhaps “seated” to “testing”). While marketers invest the majority of their time and budgets on complex areas deeper down in the funnel, MarketingExperiments research has found that most of the gain from optimizing a website occurs in clarifying the first seven seconds of users’ experience.

Much of the complex analysis and formulaic methodologies used by our scientists to create optimized pages with triple-digit conversion improvements can be summed up in this truism…

Clarity Trumps Persuasion

The first seven seconds, and perhaps just those first three, are vital to clearly guiding your visitor into an inevitable conclusion to engage in a transaction with you. Below is a quick excerpt from a recent live web clinic in which Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, the Director of MECLABS (our parent organization), discusses how your visitors interact with your website in those first few moments they land on your page…

Yet Difficulty Trumps Clarity?

Of course, so many websites produced by experienced, professional marketers don’t follow this simple principle because, in reality, it can be quite difficult to truly be clear. Put another way, what is clear to an insider (a marketer that lives, breathes, and eats his product every day) can be meaningless and confusing to your visitor. And even when you have every intention to be clear, how many monkeywrenches get thrown your way (Sales wants one thing, Operations another, and don’t even get me started on Legal)?

To help you on your journey along the road to clarity and prosperity, you can view a replay of the clinic or read the latest issue of MarketingExperiments Journal. Our next live web clinic, Maximizing your Agency ROI: How adding science to the creative process reveals a 26% gain, will be taught on January 13th from 4 to 5 p.m. EST.

Clinic Notes, General, Landing Page Optimization, Marketing Insights, Research Topics clinic, Flint McGlaughlin, landing page optimization, marketing, marketing research, online marketing, web clinic, webinar

On a webpage, the visitor experience begins and ends with the slightest movement of a finger. Potential customers can terminate our existence in a matter of seconds when first arriving to our website. Getting a new visitor to not only stick around for more than seven seconds, but to actually take an action can be like ice skating up hill.

But this is nothing new for most of our blog readers out there, and today we would like to test your marketing intuition on a landing page experiment we recently ran with one of our research partners (and like last time there will be a prize).

Background: The company we were working with provides end-to-end market solutions for small- and medium-size businesses. As you will see in the pages below they offer access to mailing lists and leads. The page we tested received most of its traffic from PPC ad campaigns using more “generic” search terms. Its primary objective is to generate as many form completions (or leads) as possible.

Test Design: This was a simple A/B/C/D multi-factorial test focused on strengthening the communication of the value proposition. Here are the page versions (click to zoom in):

Control:                                                   Treatment 1:

Treatment 2:                                             Treatment 3:

Results: So now that you understand the experiment background and have seen the treatments, can you spot which page performed the best? Before we reveal the results, here’s a chance to test your own marketing intuition (one person’s intuition will get them a chance to have their own landing page optimized live by Dr. Flint McGlaughlin on today’s web clinic – normally priceless).

1. Which page generated the most form completions?

• A. Control
• B. Treatment 1
• C. Treatment 2
• D. Treatment 3

UPDATE: Treatment 1 (option B) was the winner. It performed 201% better than the control. Congratulations to Flavio from Q-11.de, the only correct response we received. Subscribe to the MarketingExperiments Journal to be notified when the web clinic replay and research brief are available so you can see the correct answer, the results of the other treatments, and how these experiment can help you shape your own marketing campaigns.

Clinic Notes, General, Landing Page Optimization, Research Topics clinic, landing page optimization, optimization, webinar

You can hear Senior Manager of Research Partnerships Andy Mott answer the question How Can You Make Your Web Site Smarter? on the replay of Omniture’s latest webinar. But in my experience with these events, there is usually an interesting back story. So I cornered Andy in his office at a vulnerable time (his beloved Gators had recently lost the SEC Championship game) and found out what he really wanted to say…

Q: You discussed the 2009 Omniture Online Conversion Survey on a recent Omniture webinar. What surprised you the most?

Well I won’t say this surprised me. Maybe saddened is a better word. The survey asked “How frequently is online marketing testing employed in your company?” About half of the respondents said infrequently or never.

Q: Wow! That is pretty shocking, especially considering that these people are already familiar with testing through Omniture or MarketingExperiments. Maybe I could understand if this were the general population of marketers. But why have testing tools in place and not test? Why do you think half of them are flying blind?

Well people know they need to test. They probably know their competitors are testing and getting results. But the idea of executing a test is such a paradigm shift in the way that they’ve always done things.

Those that are higher in an organization tend to be more experienced. And if they are more experienced, they may be locked into the advertising agency way of doing things from 30 years ago, just like the doctor who overlooks recent findings and does what worked best for him when he went to medical school.

Q: Change is difficult. But still, thirty years ago these same people were also wearing polyester and doing the hustle. I’m a little skeptical that they would still try to shoehorn old media principles into new media.

It’s not intentional. If something has always worked for you, why change?

But what we really have is the tyranny of best practices. I’ll give you a great example. Many marketers still believe that they must have the call to action “above the fold” on a web page. Yet testing has shown this to be an utter myth.

Q: And nothing disproves a best practice better than a test that shows what actually works for their specific situation.

That’s the thing. Once companies start testing and see the ROI they are absolutely hooked.

Q: How do you take that first step? For, say, an email marketing manager reading this, how do you create a culture of testing in an organization?

Business-level executives don’t care about optimization or testing or even online marketing really. What they care about is results. So you need to talk to them in their language.

At MarketingExperiments, we publish all of our research and it is available for free. So go to the research archive and pull some experiments so you can show example results and make the business case for testing. At this point, all you are looking for is a small budget to begin testing.

Those first tests will help you establish a beachhead that you can use to further penetrate the organization. Because once businesses see the results they can gain from testing, it can get addictive. It’s like eating chips while watching a football game, you just can’t stop.

Q: The challenge is to just get the ball rolling. This sounds great in theory. Do you have any real-world examples?

I have countless examples. Since we started this conversion by talking about my recent webinar with Omniture, let me tell you about a Research Partner that first got interested in testing by attending an Omniture webinar that featured Dr. Flint McGlaughlin.

Companies that test usually like to stay anonymous because they view this process as such a competitive advantage. So I’ll just say they are a very large financial institution.

So this marketing manager attended Flint’s webinar and was totally sold. He was convinced that they should begin testing. But he’s only responsible for a very small patch in this giant company. It took him six months to get the approval to begin testing, doing the things I previously mentioned.

Q: Six months? It’s easy to get discouraged in that time. I’m not sure how many people would see it through.

But here’s the kicker. That marketing manager and his boss are now charged with trumpeting this win across the entire organization. He is now in front of his boss’s boss’s boss presenting his test results. In fact, in a few days he will be presenting in front of the SVP committee that advises the CEO.

Q: Well then he must have achieved some really out-of-this-world test results. What did he get…three digits…four digits? I mean, how common is that?

They got a 38% revenue boost over what the agency was doing.

Q: Well, that sounds decent, but a committee of SVPs really cares about 38% in one test?

You say that because you are so used to the power of testing, so you just want to see huge numbers. Let me put this another way – by not testing they would have been leaving 38% more money on the table since the cost of testing was infinitesimal compared to their massive marketing budget.

And that’s the thing. This company has a huge marketing budget. They sponsor the Olympics. They name stadiums. They purchase a ton of media. And since they don’t have space to sell in most of these executions, they’re driving everyone to the website. So if they find they could make more 38% more money without having to increase any of these huge marketing spends, the increase in ROI is humongous. Even a one or two percent increase could make or break a quarter.

Q: I see. I didn’t make the connection to that old media marketing spend. But I would think it goes beyond just old media driving people to a website. Online marketing is growing by leaps and bounds. I would think companies want to make sure they are getting a return on that investment as well. According to Forrester Research, digital spending will nearly double over the next five years at the expense of traditional marketing.

Forget five years from now, even today companies spend more than $25 billion on interactive marketing – things like mobile marketing, social media, email marketing, display advertising, and search marketing. That is 12% of all advertising spending. So when enterprises, like that financial institution I discussed, learn that they can take just a tiny fraction of the spend on this growing segment and invest it in a way that ensures the effectiveness of everything else they do – with real-world, statistically valid data – they get very excited.

Q: And I would think, for the employees that can tell management “I know how to get the best ROI from this” – not think or have an opinion, but know with real numbers – that’s quite a smart career move.

If other people are discussing so-called “best practices” and you’re showing real results, then you become the go-to person. The one who knows how this stuff really works. Because nothing defeats the tyranny of best practices as well as the audacity of testing.

And if you’re the guy that knows the right things to do in an explosively growing field like Internet marketing, while marketing budgets on everything else are falling, you’re in a good place no matter what the economy is doing.

How did you get the ball rolling on testing in your organization? What are your biggest challenges to create a culture of testing in your organization? Share your triumphs and challenges in the comments section below or post them to our MarketingExperiments Optimization group.

Internet Marketing News, Internet Marketing Strategy, Marketing Insights, Marketing Q&A, Practical Application advertising, Internet marketing, resources, webinar

This has not been a banner year for marketing budgets by any estimation. So you might be surprised that two tactics actually garnered increased budgets in 2009 – email and social media. Your peers consider email a highly cost-effective tactic and see social media as a way to extend that content to new markets. This research comes from MarketingSherpa’s 2010 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, which contains practical data to improve your budgeting and grow your overall business.

We’ve found email marketing to be a hot topic as well, with near-record attendance at Wednesday’s web clinic (If you couldn’t attend, please subscribe to the free MarketingExperiments Journal to be notified when the replay and research brief are available). To build on that clinic, which explored ways to maximize revenue from your house list, here is a cost-effective way to grow your list:

In the past year, low-cost has become the most popular modifier of the word “campaigns” for most marketers. Of course, you never want to sacrifice results simply for the sake of cost. According to the 2010 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, blog contests are an inexpensive way to quickly gain motivated subscribers. Here are the seven key steps to making the most of blog contests to rapidly grow your list:

Bullseye

There are highly relevant audiences for blogs on almost every interest under the sun, including Sun (Microsystems, that is) and, likely, an audience with interests very similar to your best customers. But, contrary to popular belief, these audiences aren’t all micro. According to the web-traffic analysts at Compete, some so-called “mommy blogs” get well over 100,000 unique visitors a month. For an example, see Dooce (if you’re a parent, you know what she’s referring to).

Lay down the law

Make sure you clearly define a set of rules to keep everything running smoothly. For example, you could give extra entries to readers who refer friends. Or even host a second, private contest for the blogger who generates the most entries. And remember, the more compelling the prize, the more motivated your audience will be.

…and he told two friends…and she told two friends

After you set up a landing page to explain the contest and capture entrant’s information and referrals, email referred prospects automatically and invite them to join the contest as well. With luck (and a compelling contest), you may reach the Holy Grail of cost-effective online promotion – going viral.

Seek the source

To understand which channels deliver best, create coded links to track traffic originating from blogs (with unique links for each blog), referrals, newsletter emails to current subscribers, social networks, etc. If you hold a separate blogger contest as well, you could create an anonymized tracking page to show bloggers how many entries they’ve generated compared to competitors, which may encourage them to step up efforts.

Release the hounds

Once you have the mechanics of the contest in place, finding the right bloggers will take a bit of hunting on your part. Here’s one simple strategy. Use basic Web searches to find applicable blogs. When you spot a likely target, use its “blog roll,” or links section, to find similar sites. Look at the sites’ number of RSS subscribers (if publicized) as well as the freshness of its content. Then, you can reach out to the bloggers (using info found on the site or a “Contact Us” form) with an email that includes a description of the contest, a coded link to the landing page, a link to the stats page, and a link to a promo ad.

Remember your members

While these bloggers will hopefully drive new subscribers, don’t forget to let the current members of your virtual fan club enter as well. The contest deserves at least a mention in your email newsletter, Twitter feed, Facebook group, social networks, weekly coffee klatch, Pinochle tournaments, and any other place you regularly communicate with your most loyal customers. Not only are you deepening your relationship with existing customers, making it easy for them to pass the contest on to friends is another cost-effective, viral way to grow your list.

Rinse, wash, repeat

If you do not prevent multiple signups, you will have to scrub your list of duplicates. You may also want to remind new subscribers why they are receiving your email newsletter (“Thank you for entering our contest and signing up for…”). Include an easy way to unsubscribe, a must for the CAN-SPAM Act, since some may have focused more on your prize than the fact that they were also signing up for an email newsletter. This is also a way for your least motivated list members to self-select and get removed before too many of them hit the “SPAM” button and hinder your deliverability.

After you’ve counted all your new subscribers, look at your metrics to see what you could have done better. And then, start another contest with your newfound knowledge pushing you to even greater success.

For a real-world example of a marketer that used these tactics to grow a small email list to 20 times its previous size, turn to page 129 of the 2010 Email Marketing Benchmark Report. MarketingExperiments blog readers can receive a $100 discount.

And for a more in-depth look at making email and social media deliver for your bottom line, check out Email Summit ’10 in Miami from January 20-22. PLUS, Dr. Flint McGlaughlin will teach a Pre-Summit Live Email Optimization Workshop to help you maximize your email capture rate and quality. Register by January 8 to receive an early bird discount of $200.

Photo attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/idogcow/ / CC BY 2.0

Email Marketing, Internet Marketing Strategy, Marketing Insights, Research Topics clinic, email, Email Marketing, MarketingSherpa, viral marketing, webinar

Sending more than 1.2 billion emails per year is a significant marketing investment. And for one of our Research Partners, this effort raised several questions:

• When will their list get irritated?
• How many emails should be sent on a regular basis?
• At what point do emails start hurting sales?

To ensure they were getting the most value from their marketing spend, our Research Partner wanted definitive, data-driven answers. So we tested for the optimal frequency that will maximize total revenue. While our scientists now have the benefit of reams of information and know the answer to these questions, we thought it would be a fun challenge to your “marketer’s gut” to test your acumen and see if you could spot a winner based on sheer intuition (and yes, there is a prize).

Background: The Research Partner is a large ecommerce company that sells well-known, inexpensive, perishable products online (if we told you any more we’d have to kill you). They had a massive, yet varying email send rate and was emailing the house list anywhere from once a week to four times a week. Most of the Research Partner’s strategy was based on the offers available at the time. With such variance in frequency, we wondered if sending more email messages would have overly negative effects on unsubscribe rates. And likewise, we wondered how much impact sending fewer emails would have on revenue. Ultimately, we were looking for that optimal email-sending sweet spot.

Test Design: We took a small, highly-motivated segment of the Research Partner’s house list and used it as our testing sample. We then split that list into seven segments that would receive different send frequencies as represented below:

Segment 1: 1X PER MONTH

Segment 2: 2X PER MONTH

Segment 3: 3X PER MONTH

Segment 4: 4X PER MONTH

Segment 5: 6X PER MONTH

Segment 6: 10X PER MONTH

Segment 7: 15X PER MONTH

We monitored the effect of the send frequencies for 60 days. We tracked delivery, open rates, click-through, conversion, revenue, spam complaints, and unsubscribe rates throughout the duration test.

Results: Testing for optimal frequency assumes that revenue and unsubscribes will increase at a steady rate until the list gets irritated. At that point, revenue will experience diminishing returns and even decrease. Likewise, unsubscribe rates will increase at that point of irritation.

We wanted to test the validity of this assumption, as well as discover the optimal email frequency for this company’s email list that increased both total revenue and lifetime value of the customer.

But before we reveal the results from our scientists’ brains, we want to test your “marketing gut” with the following question (Oh, and just to spice things up a little, one person’s intuition will get them a free seat in one of our online certification courses – normally $595.):

1. What is the optimal monthly send frequency for this company?
   1. 1-2 per month
   2. 3-5 per month
   3. 6-9 per month
   4. 10-15 per month

Congratulations to Sharon Mostyn, winner of the Email Frequency Contest, and one of only a handful of correct responses. Sharon chose the Landing Page Optimization Course as her prize. Subscribe to the MarketingExperiments Journal to be notified when the web clinic replay and research brief are available so you can see the correct answer along with a full analysis of how this discovery can help you shape your email campaigns.

To enter the contest, leave your choice as a comment to this blog post along with your email address or Twitter handle (make sure you’re following @MktgExperiments so we can reach you). We will select a winner randomly from the correct responses (and yes there is a correct answer). The winner and results for this test will be announced live on Wednesday afternoon at 4 p.m. EST during our free web clinic – Optimize your Email in Three Steps: How one marketer tripled revenue from their house list.

Analytics & Testing, Clinic Notes, Email Marketing, General, Research Topics B2C, clinic, Ecommerce, Email Marketing, email optimization, marketing, optimization, retail, shopping, webinar