JupiterResearch in its January 2005 report titled Effective Email Marketing found that marketers using testing were almost twice as likely to attain conversion rates of three percent or better. They also achieved a 68 percent improvement in return over non-testers.

Email is extremely measurable but few marketers take advantage of this. Bill Nussey at iMedia Connection pointed out how marketers could test different elements before carrying out a full-fledged campaign. You simply need to test them with the right tools.

An email marketer could test about any aspect of a message:

• Groups - which respond to email and which don’t.
• Offer - test different offer to see which drives the greatest conversions.
• Subject line - which trigger higher open rate.
• Types of subject line - catchy or straightforward?
• Email format - which works best, text or HTML.
• Demographics - which are more likely to make a purchase.

Here are a few simple guidelines to get your testing program started:

• Sample your list - The size should be able to represent the whole list.
• Time matters - Different time of day or day in week could yield different result. For the test to be valid, test at the same time.
• Focus on statistical relevancy - Get at least 50 to 100 responses for each test before you can be quite sure you can make a scientific judgement about which test performed best.
• Maintain a control group - A control group is a random sample of your list that is excluded from the change you are testing. Take a different test against this group.
• What you can learn - Not only you should know which offer works best, but integrate test results with preferences, demographics, purchase history and other customer traits to learn characteristics of appealing message.

In email marketing, you can improve results by either building larger list, getting better results from existing list, or both. The second one takes your time to perform, but could make a different to your bottom line — especially given the fact that it is more about optimizing what you can control versus spending money to get more leads into your list.

Those guidelines barely scratch the surface of email testing, but it should give a good starting point to work from.

Source: iMedia Connection.