Email Optimization

Your ideal prospects delete most of the emails they receive each day. What happens when they receive yours? Do they even stop to notice? Or do they file it nicely away in that special folder reserved for every hype-laden, sales-driven, marketing-bloated message they receive – the crowded “Trash” folder? How do you ensure your email doesn’t get lost in the shuffle? According to Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, CEO (Managing Director), MECLABS, one principle is key – the objective of an email is to get a click.

Over the past several weeks, the MarketingExperiments team has taught extensively about the principles we've discovered from email marketing experimentation and how marketers can apply them to optimize email response.

Where is your greatest opportunity to increase email marketing ROI, and how can you capitalize on it?

Creative – it's the line item in many marketing budgets that is often the hardest to judge…let alone actually measure.

What are you getting for this spend? How do you know if this investment is having an impact on your bottom line? And which creative execution should you pick?

Your peers’ biggest email marketing challenge (88% find it very important) is to retain existing customers, according to the MarketingSherpa 2010 Email Marketing Benchmark Report. Cost-conscious organizations are trying to offset the impact of the recession by keeping what they have.

In our December 2 clinic, the MarketingExperiments team shared research which illustrated how to increase email ROI from your current subscribers in a time of decreasing demand. President Greg Burningham and researchers Boris Grinkot, Heather Andruk, and Corey Trent discussed the three steps to a successful email campaign.

Anyone who has set up an email campaign knows many factors need to be considered before hitting the Send button:

• Quality of leads and lists;
• segmenting and targeting;
• envelope fields;
• copy content and length; and
• where prospects or subscribers end up once they click through to the offer.

Mastering any process requires knowing where to begin, and email optimization is no exception.

This brief introduces a symbolic notation illustrating our approach to that process: The MarketingExperiments Email Optimization Sequence^sm.

We are seeking answers to two key questions:

1. What is the most effective way to approach an email messaging optimization project: Where should you begin?
2. As you begin, what role does Relevance play in the optimization process?

Email has become an extremely powerful marketing tool. In fact, U.S. firms spent 400 million in 2006.

Our research has identified 7 distinct factors of email marketing campaign effectiveness. Not surprisingly, body copy is among the factors with the greatest impact (highest coefficient).

Email has become an extremely powerful marketing tool. In fact, U.S. firms spent 400 million in 2006.

Our research has identified 7 distinct factors of email marketing campaign effectiveness. Not surprisingly, body copy is among the factors with the greatest impact (highest coefficient).

At MarketingExperiments.com, we have repeatedly stressed this point: The best publishers are good retailers; the best retailers are good publishers.

However, many pure retail operations ...