Website Optimisation Part 3: Getting Your Emails Opened And Read

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This is the 3rd instalment of a 7 article series on how to accelerate your online sales using the Marketing Results ‘hybrid’ approach to website optimisation.

See Part 1 | Part 2

Email Marketing Optimisation - How To Get More Emails Opened and Read

Not every website or company has a newsletter or email strategy, but email campaigns often prove to be very profitable. Keeping in touch with prospects or clients is one of the simplest ways to encourage deeper engagement with your website and increase sales volume.

But how many of your clients are actually opening and reading your emails? Many email services provide you with statistics on open rates and click through rates, which are a good start, but in isolation this information is not particularly useful from a results improvement point of view.

Split-testing multiple email copy versions is a much faster way to improve your results. (Most email platforms don’t support split-testing of subject lines and email content, but many systems can handle it with some manual intervention. Testing is worth the effort. The system I recommend which does support automated split testing is called Aweber.)

Here’s a simple example of how optimising your email process can work:

In this example, the target opt-in list was broken up into three randomly selected groups. Three different emails were sent containing the same body text but different subject lines.

Here are the headlines and results:

Subject Line 1: “FIRSNAME, November Client Attraction Newsletter out now” Click through rate: 20.3%

Subject Line 2: “FIRSTNAME, here’s a new 7 Marketing Trends report for you Click through rate: 28.0%

Subject Line 3: “FIRSTNAME, 7 Marketing Trends I think you should know about” Click through rate: 45.6%

The winning headline outperformed the second best headline by 63% and the worst headline by 125%!

Making this type of split test an integral part of your online marketing process allows you to ramp up your results by orders of magnitude on an ongoing basis.

SIDEBAR:

Two factors that can influence the effectiveness of email subject lines are Personalisation and Proximity.

Personalisation: “FIRSTNAME, how to improve your profits” will perform better than ‘How to improve your profits’.

Proximity: Proximity means writing your subject lines such that they convey your message as quickly as possible (preferably in the first 4 or 5 words). Most email clients only display the first few words of a subject line, so it pays to make them count. Subject Line 3 above communicates the most information the fastest, which is why I believe it performed best.

END SIDEBAR:

Here are some more ideas on how to translate your test results into improved outcomes:

• Keep a “knowledge base” of email test results, including which subject line formats and templates produced better results.
• Test one segment of a large list first, then mail the whole list with the best-performing version.
• Test a number of versions, then re-mail the entire list with the best performing subject line (Hint: a second mailing of the same email to the same list can produce around 50% of the original response again.)
• Add the best-performing version to the end of an existing autoresponder or follow up sequence with the knowledge that it performs better than other tested alternatives (this is an easy way to redeploy valuable content).

Conclusion

Subject lines are just one of the variables that can be tested, but they are an obvious leverage point and a good place to start. What would happen to the effectiveness of your email campaigns if you split tested every email broadcast and optimised accordingly?

 

7-Part Website Optimisation Series

• Part 1: Advanced Conversion Tracking
• Part 2: Cross Channel Tracking
• Part 3: Getting Your Emails Opened And Read
• Part 4: Retaining Email List Subscribers
• Part 5: Boosting Website Conversion
• Part 6: Visualising Where Users Are Clicking
• Part 7: Keyword Conversion Of Natural Search Campaigns

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