Email Marketing by the Numbers: How to Use the World’s Greatest Marketing Tool to Take Any Organization to the Next Level

Testing Against Your Goals

By John WallProducer, M Show ProductionsBlog: http://www.themshow.com

For marketers, email is a gift from the gods. It removes virtually all of the friction from customer communication and the campaign, squishing cycles that used to be months down to hours.

The greatest benefit of such rapid cycles is that you are now free to test everything. I still remember the first time I heard Chris Baggott speak on email testing: He said, “Every campaign must have a champion and a challenger.”

The variables that can be tested are infinite, but there is one best practice: The earlier in the process you can improve results, the greater the possibility of significant benefits. For example, if you could increase conversions on your landing page by 20 percent, that may not be as beneficial as a 10 percent increase in deliverability if your list is large enough and you have a large number of click-throughs.

While you want to tweak the process from the front, you should measure your results from the end. Worry about closed business first and work your way up to conversions and then opens (although you will probably do this all concurrently if your sales cycle is beyond one month). Increasing opens by 200 percent means little if the lift never equates to a signed purchase order.

The only hard part about testing is that there is no “right” answer. The target is always moving. The things that delight customers go in and out of fashion, and all you are doing by testing is ...