VerticalResponse Email Marketing Blog for Small Business

The Results Are in! Takeaways from VR Email Tests: CTA Edition

Photo credit: Sebastian Bergmann

We're already a few weeks into 2012 and I don't know about you, but some of my New Year's resolutions have already started falling by the wayside (gym membership, what?). One thing I am happy to say I've stuck to, is testing a lot of different things in my email communications. This isn't just because testing is an integral part of my job, but also because I'm a huge data geek (nerd?) and am always looking to learn more about my intended readers' behavior. So I thought it might be fun to share some of these tests in a series of blog posts throughout the year. Maybe you can take advantage of some of these findings too!

 

The Tale of the Tape

In this post I'll be going over a test we ran on the positioning of a call-to-action button (you can call it CTA) for one of our promotional emails. Originally, our emails would look like this (version A):

Then we thought, why don't we make the CTA the first thing the recipient sees when he/she opens the email, well above the fold? So we drafted up the following (version B):

We made sure to tag the links for the CTA and banner images in both versions with referred-by codes (simply add "/?REFERREDBY=XXX" at the end of your URLs, with REFERREDBY and XXX being something relevant to you, for example in our case we used "/?image=CTA" and "/?image=banner") in order to differentiate them in VerticalResponse's reporting tool. We set up both versions with identical offers and messaging, with a separate mailing list each, and off the emails went.

And the Winner is...

Results were rather surprising: version B's CTA button garnered about the same amount of clicks as version A's, but its clickthrough rate (unique number of clicks divided by total number of opens) overall was superior by 12% while bringing in over 33% more revenue. Version B by decision victory!

Surprised by these results? What kind of tests would you be interested in reading about moving forward?

Posted by My Truong

My Truong is the Marketing Programs Manager at VerticalResponse. Connect with him on Twitter @PtitMy.

 

 

Related posts:

Take a Walk into a Testing Wonderland

A Surprising Marketing Test & The Results

Adventures In Testing - Our Very Own "Which Test Won"

The Best & Worst of Black Friday & Cyber Monday Emails

Everyone loves the long Thanksgiving holiday for different reasons. As a lifecycle marketer, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are like the Super Bowl for me.

According to our friends over at the Retail Email Blog, references to Black Friday during Black Friday week were up 48% as of Tuesday, November 22. And, the top online retailers sent each of their subscribers a new all-time high of 4.9 promotional emails on average during the week ending Nov. 25, 2011, eclipsing the previous record of 4.6 set last year at the height of the holiday season. That’s up 18% week-over-week, up 35% from where it was four weeks ago, and up 19% year-over-year. Weekly email volume should rise for another couple of weeks before starting to decline as the holiday season begins to wind down.

While others watched football or shopped 'til they dropped, I scoured my inbox for some great and not-so-great examples to share with you.

There were three common themes in the subject lines that I received: Gobble, Black Friday and Cyber Monday. I have to hand it to mass-retailer Old Navy for using the From Label Gobblepalooza - fun and brand appropriate.

Old Navy Gobblepalooza: The Year's BIGGEST SALE Starts Tomorrow! In Stores & Online

Subject lines that caught my attention addressed a specific need or obstacle that shoppers might need to overcome like crowds, shipping, etc. Some stand-out examples include:

• Lou Malnati's To-Go: Dasher's Early Bird Special from Tastes of Chicago (Lou's didn't even bother with the turkey and went straight in for reindeer!)
• Zagg Inc: Open me to see our Black Friday sale
• BananaRepublic.com: Open me today for special deals + FREE Shipping Every Day
• LeapFrog: Black Friday Savings without the Big Crowds!
• TOMS Headquarters: Giving Just Got Easier...Free Shipping!
• GoCoffeeGo: Exclusive Black Friday / Cyber Monday Super-Sale Deals!
• Spreecast: Thanksgiving, Football & Black Friday, Oh My!
• Thrillist: SF: Screw Black Friday, Let's Drink
• Disney Store: Cyber Monday Savings! Free Shipping PLUS Up to 25% Off
• Groupon: Groupon Celebrates Small Business Saturday - Shop Local Today!

I was surprised that I didn't see more Small Business Saturday subject lines, but perhaps SBS got a bit lost in the holiday shuffle?

Of course, there were some duds, in my humble opinion, including these turkeys:

• Spanx: Happy Turkey Day! Eat Up & Slim Down! (Um, I don't know about you, but I don't want to think about eating up and slimming down in the same sentence on Thanksgiving)
• Poppy's Closet: Don't read me! You just might... (This tactic did not work for me)
• Bliss Beauty: No Subject  (they forgot to include a subject line!) Doh! Talk about a missed opportunity. Then they proceeded to send an email every day throughout the weekend.
  

With the biggest month of sales ahead, what will you do to make your emails stand out in the inbox? Check out our Creating a Successful Email webinar on 12/15 from 1-2 pm PST for tips and tactics.

Related posts: 25 Holiday Subject Lines that Dazzled Our Inboxes

Posted by Kim Stiglitz.

Kim Stiglitz is the Director of Lifecycle Marketing at VerticalResponse. Connect with her on Twitter at @Stiggy1.

Take a Walk into a Testing Wonderland

The word "test" has a natural, negative connotation - it can evoke fear, anxiety, and/or spontaneous outbursts of crying (or maybe that's just me?), and there's even a technical term for the fear of tests called "Testophobia." However, testing in the world of email marketing has quite the opposite effect. According to Anne Holland's WhichTestWon.com, "A/B and multivariate testing can - on average - help lead generation marketers get 40% more leads…and e-commerce marketers can expect a 20-25% sales lift if they do a round of tests." This sounds like joyous news to me!

During the holidays, emails in your inbox will also increase by more than 47% (according to the Email Experience Council), so since we're all sending a little more cheer, it's the right time to test. Plus, testing is as fun as giving presents (okay, that's just the nerdy email marketer in me!), easier than losing holiday weight, and gives you invaluable information about your customers. So how in the mistletoe do you test an email? By conducting a very, merry split test.

The number of ways you can test an email could be compared to the number of snowflakes in a blizzard - endless. So, start with these basics and you won't get snowed-in:

1. Subject Line - This is one of the most important aspects of your email to test. If you were in a room full of presents (because this happens often), and could only choose one, which gift would you take? The most interesting, the biggest, the smallest? Either way, it needs to twinkle to catch one's eye, just like a subject line in an inbox. Try a long vs. short subject line, include a sense of urgency vs. none, add some holiday puns to get into the spirit or keep it simple. The possibilities are endless.

2. Button Text & Colors - Call-to-action buttons can drastically increase your click-through rates. So, if you're not using them already, jump on that sleigh-like bandwagon. Try changing the colors (green, blue, red, etc.) and/or use holiday-themed buttons (we have some free ones for you). Experiment with the text by including different call-to-action statements like "Get it Now," "Get 50% Off," "Save $20," "Buy Now," "Add to Cart."

3. Content - The average online readership attention span lasts about 140 characters (hence, why sites like Twitter exist), so similar to your subject line; try long vs. short pieces of content; include testimonials vs. none; change the placement or order of your text and experiment with different writing styles.

4. The Offer - Holiday offers are going to be aplenty, so testing yours will give great insight as to what really stands out in the crowd. Try offering a percentage off the price vs. a dollar amount, or something for free/complimentary vs. reduced. Experiment with a clear call-to-action vs. a description of the offer. If at all possible, try increasing or decreasing the price or discount percentage you're offering. Also experiment with sale time limits (i.e., two weeks vs. three days).

Here are some testing dos and don'ts to try all year long:

• Do: Test one thing at a time

• Do: Take some risk

• Do: Measure & track your results

• Do: Test often

• Do: Let us know how you'll be testing your emails this holiday season

• Don't: Stop believing…in how effective and fun email testing can be!

Want more info or ideas on testing? Attend the webinar: Test Your Email & Lists for Success on Nov. 17th; check out our blog post: Adventures in Testing; download a guide: Testing, Testing, 123: Email Testing for Everyone, or learn how to set up a split test in a short video.

Posted by: Colleen Corkery

Colleen Corkery is the Lifecycle Marketing Coordinator at VerticalResponse. She writes and reaps about all email-related things. Connect with her on Twitter at @youcollme

Use Buttons Instead of Links and Increase Your Clicks

There has been some research around whether using "buttons" on your website and in your email marketing campaigns as a call-to-action instead of words with links drives more clicks. It's one of those things that every company really has to test for themselves.

For businesses that market to consumers, you'll probably find buttons like "Sign Up Now" or "Buy Now." If you're marketing to businesses and you offer a white paper you might use the text "Download Now" or if you've got a tutorial for your viewers to watch it might be "View the Demo." At any rate, an "actionable" word will usually work better than a passive one on your button. Instead of saying "Free Trial" you might try something like "Start Your Free Trial." All of these things might seem subtle, but they also might get your readers doing what you want them to do. 

Our marketing team developed a few buttons for us to use internally. Feel free to grab 'em or copy them if they'll work for your business! 

In the end, it's all pretty scientific, so as always we suggest you test both and see what works for your own audience!

Some great resources I found for creating buttons:

Best Practices for Using Buttons 

35 Creative call to action buttons for inspiration

How to Make an Effective Call to Action Button

Are you seeing a better response with buttons?

Free Guide: Email Marketing Resolutions for 2010

We’ve already given you your Small Business Checklist for 2010, and so what that it's already February. Here's your Email Marketing Resolution list (yep, add this to your long list of resolutions) for you to follow. It will help you improve your email marketing and continue to use email to grow your business this year.

It’s packed with ideas like:

• Grow Your Email List
• Make an Email Marketing Plan
• Segment Lists
• Test
• Integrate Social Media and Email
• And much, much more!

So what are you waiting for? Download this free guide now!

Case Study: Test a Subject Line in 2 Minutes & Get More Clicks

Recently we did a survey on the State of Small Business, you may have received it. Our Marketing team performed a subject line test in the email. One subject line was very generic and one was a bit more specific. We split our list in half using the list segmentation tool. It took just a few extra minutes but from what we learned it was worth it.

The first subject line: Take Our Survey and Tell Us What You Think

We received 181 more opens and 35 more clicks than the following more specific subject line: Take 5 Minutes - See How Your Business Stacks Up

In this specific case it seemed to be that we had more opens and clicks from the generic subject line and more people taking our survey. This illustrates why it's important to be testing subject lines to get more opens or content inside your email to be getting more clicks.

Make All Of Your Clicks Count

You spend your valuable time creating your email marketing campaign, you load it with images, text and links, but where do you send your clickers? Hopefully not a black hole where they don't really know what to do! Let's take a look at 4 places that you are probably sending your clickers to and what you could do better.

Your E-commerce Site

If you're selling a product, the worst thing you can do is send your clickers to your home page. Why? You want to get them to the specific product page fast since that's what they're really interested in. If they have to search for the product they're interested in it could result in them being frustrated and potentially leaving your site.

Also, put as much information about your product on the page you send them to. Having them click to another page to get even more info is unnecessary and can be frustrating for them. If you do have lots of images you might want to try using thumbnails that they can scroll over to enlarge so that the page isn't so long.

Your Website

Websites can get out of control over a period of time can't they? You keep adding pages and pages. So it's better to be very specific when sending anyone there. If you've got a press release or you want them to download a white paper, fill out a form, or watch a video, make sure you send them right to the specific pages on your site that host these things. In general, people don't have the time or the patience to weave through your site to find them.

Your Blog

If a recipient clicks on a link to read the rest of a story and is directed to the front page of your blog where they may have to scroll to find the story, you'll likely get a frustrated reader. Even if your current story is at the top the day you sent your email, your reader might not read your email for a few days. In the meantime you might do another blog post forcing the post they want to read down the page.

I understand that you may want them to see other things on your blog, but don't worry, people will look around if they're interested. So send them to the 'permalink' of your post, it is the permanent link to where that post will always be.

Your Landing Page

If you send them to a landing page that is specific to the product you want them to buy or the story you want them to read, that's great! The benefit of you doing this is that you can test things on that page like placement of image, or copy to see what gets the best results. Then if that test results in you getting more products purchased, change your page for the better!

Analyze

If you have Google Analytics (free) or another web analytics program installed on your ecommerce site, your blog or your landing pages, that's a step in the right direction. As a side note, VerticalResponse has an integration with Google Analytics that takes analyzing email campaign clicks a few steps further. You'll be able to track where else people go from your email campaigns all over your site, blog or landing pages. Then you'll see what type of content they're really interested in and you could put it to work in your next email marketing campaign.

5 Easy Things to Test to Get a Better Response in Your Email Marketing Campaigns

Testing something new or changing something seemingly small in your email campaigns can definitely tell you something about how your recipients will respond. You'll either get more open & clicks or you won't. But you won't know until you try.

Testing something new can SEEM like a lot of work but it's really not. If you're going to create an email marketing campaign anyway, it's just three more tiny steps.

    One: Make a copy of the campaign you're creating
    Two: Change a little part of the campaign (see below)
    Three: Test with a small portion of your list or split your list in two

These three simple steps could get you a better response to your next email campaign and it takes just minutes for you to do. Unleash the mad scientist in you with these 5 easy things to test within your next email marketing campaign.

1. Subject Line - If no one opens your email, it doesn't matter how pretty it is on the inside, so why not test two different subject lines? Here's an idea; look at your past campaigns and see what your recipients are clicking on, then include that offer or article in your new subject line. After you send it out compare your open and click rates to see if you got a better response than normal.

2. Offer - Test a % discount vs. a pricing discount like 20% off vs. a $10 savings. Run a test with free shipping vs. no free shipping or with an expiration date vs. no expiration date. Then roll out to the rest of your list the winning offer.

3. Format - Instead of including a sidebar in your emails, try removing it so that perhaps more of your content is "above the fold" or the part of an email or web page that is visible without scrolling. Make sure you've got some links above the fold so you can tell if it's working. If you get more clicks you may want to consider changing your format for good.

4. Links - If your email has 5 links to your offer, try including 5 more and see if your response increases. Read Are Your Clicks Happening Below The Fold?

5. Images - Try removing images and see if a text version of your email works better. How 90's of you!

You can either split your list in half and do the test or you can break off a small piece of your list and do the test a day in advance of your real email campaign date. Then roll out to your bigger list with the winner. Here is how you can do it using VerticalResponse.

One last thing, if you are going to test any of these make sure you test them one at a time so you know which change actually made the difference.

Reporting: How Are You Using It, Or Are You?

        If you are currently using any reputable email service provider like VerticalResponse, you definitely have access to basic reports about how your email marketing campaigns are doing. The real question is, what are you doing with that information? I've put together some ranges for the stats you probably view and some ideas you could be doing with that information to make your email campaigns even better.

Open Rate

 

Customers who tend to have great relationships with their customers can get open rates as high as 40%, which is great. Others that have gathered their lists over several years and potentially lost some customers could be in the 14-18% range. 

 

Idea: Get rid of the dead weight. If you've been sending someone email for years and they've never opened your email or clicked a link, then maybe email just isn't the way you should be contacting them. Why not try calling them or dropping them a postcard to see if that wakes them up? THEN you can try to develop an online relationship with them at a later date. You'll be mailing to more active people in the long run.

 

Idea: Download your list of NON-RESPONDERS, these are people who have neither clicked on a link nor opened your email.  Then, a week or so after you've sent a campaign, send them the same email, but switch up the subject line to something more catchy to see if you can get more people opening.

 

Click Rate

 

Click rates usually fall in the 1-3% range.  However, if they've got an amazing story to tell or great deal to give, then we see it skyrocket to the 8-10% range. Anything over that you're off the charts. Again it all depends on that relationship you have with your customers. 

 

Idea: Test including more links in your email. We tested linking our article headlines and squeezed some more clicks out of people. Make sure all of your images are linked as well. 

 

Bounce Rate

 

We've seen our customers average bounce rates usually come in under .5%. However, lists mailed less frequently can have bounce rates in the 5%-7% range. A list that is mailed for the first time can have up to a 50% bounce rate depending on how "new" it is.

 

Idea: Download your list of bounces. If you have their postal addresses, send them a postcard asking them to update their email address. Then direct them to an opt-in form where you capture their new address. You may have to sweeten the deal with an offer on their next purchase or something free like a gift card. It's worth it for you not to lose that customer.

 

Unsubscribe Rate

 

A regularly mailed list has an average unsubscribe rate around the .2-.5% range. A less frequently mailed email list can creep up to the 2-5% range. 

 

Idea: Keep in more frequent touch with your recipients. Instead of once every 3 months why not make the time and increase it to once per month. A customer of yours may be on their way out the door, you don't want that.

 

Any ideas of your own that you'd like to share? We'd love to hear them.

Are Your Clicks Happening Below the Fold?

I was recently analyzing some past email marketing campaigns that we do here ourselves at VerticalResponse, much like the one you (hopefully) read every two weeks.

Our newsletter as you may know has a column on the left hand side with some information and has our blog posts (2-3 depending on my level of "busy") on the top and down the right hand side.

I wanted to find out what percentage of clicks in a given newsletter really happen to those articles "below the fold". BTF is the area where you have to begin scrolling to see the rest of the email in your email reader.

Stats are always interesting to me so I thought I'd share.

43-60% of all clicks in an email happened in the first article which is mainly above the fold. Caveat, we have been using "anchor tags" above the fold to give readers a tease of what's below. We think it has helped our click rate overall. (I try to lead with what I think is the strongest to pull readers in.)

15-30% of all clicks happened on the 2nd article.

6-8% of all clicks happened in the third article.

Then I looked at all of the article headlines above the fold (which also serve as the subject line in most cases) to see the specific percentages of clicks in the given email:

• 6 Ways to Reduce Costs and Gain Customers - 43%
• Great Idea for Member Appreciation - 60%
• VerticalResponse Has Surveys - 54%
• Email Etiquette: 3 Things to Think About When Emailing Someone One on One - 43%
• 9 Cheap and Easy Ideas to Help Your Business Grow - 54%

The last one was interesting - Although it was in line with what our ranges are for the specific email it got the most clicks on a link ever. This email happened to have twice the amount of links included in it than any of the other campaigns.

There was one email with the article line up that looked out of the norm:

• 1st article: 6 Ways to Reduce Costs and Gain Customers - 43%
• 2nd article: 5 Ways to Put Surveys to Use for Your Business - 9.4%
• 3rd article: Lead Generation Idea - Good, Bad & Ugly - 26.2%

The third one was the only one that didn't fall in line with the rest of the emails. The only thing I could think of was that the the Lead Generation Idea did appeal to a wider audience than those interested in surveys.

What can I take away from it all?

I'm going to keep leading with what is the strongest content, what I want to get the most clicks to. 

I can test putting a strong article on the bottom, forcing people to scroll through the rest of my information. It could potentially give me more clicks overall. I think I'd take a small part of my list to do this though.

I'm going to double up the links. When I included more links in my email, even though the "Cheap & Easy" article was hot, the overall number of clicks increased.

Got any ideas of your own? Love to hear them!