The Science of Successful E-mail Marketing
3-04-2010
by Andrew Klein
Open my leather billfold and you’ll discover a pocket-sized periodic table from National Chemistry Week 1999. No kidding. Hydrogen to Meitnerium, it’s all there. On the opposite side, the card reads Proud To Be a Chemist: As a chemist, my work contributes to the high quality of modern life.
While my goggle days have long since passed, I’ve kept this card as a reminder to continually experiment, to apply scientific analysis to life’s unknowns and discover new outcomes. As a marketer, I’ve found that science is critical for anticipating and improving customer responses. And in marketing, there is no better laboratory than e-mail, where testing, recalibrating, and redeploying a message can happen in an instant.
E-mail marketing has spun around the centrifuge for many years now, but marketers continue to be perplexed by the most common elements: subject lines, personalization, layouts, etc. Thanks to marketing scientists who are digging deeper into e-mail metrics, we are beginning to understand what components are catalysts for customer reactions. In a recent study conducted by Pinpointe titled "Case Studies: Use Split Testing to Improve Email Response Rates” a handful of experiments were conducted to determine which e-mail elements fuel responses:
Subject Lines
Objective: How does the length of a subject line affect response rates?
Result: Short subject lines (40-50 characters) outperformed longer subject lines by over 524%.
Offers
Objective: How will different offers impact response rates?
Result: Relevant business offers lifted results by 46% vs. irrelevant offers (e.g. iPod giveaway) or no offers.
Personalization
Objective: How will personalizing or not personalizing an e-mail impact results?
Result: Personalization increased open rates by 9%, click-through rates 122%, and conversion rates 93%.
Experiments like these are the keys to achieving e-mail marketing success. Recently at Oliver Russell, we hypothesized that an e-mail featuring a simple message contained within a primary graphic would outperform a client’s traditional, copy-heavy template. We tested our theory, and the results were telling: a 330% lift in response. Our client subsequently redesigned their e-mail template, and campaigns leveraging the new layout have far outperformed the old format.
The need for testing is compounded by the fact that successful e-mail marketing is constantly being transformed. As B2B Magazine reported in its 2009 E-mail Marketer Insight Guide, “Marketers increasingly are relying on e-mail marketing as a cost-efficient way to connect directly with their customers and prospects, and as a result, their efforts have become more sophisticated. At the same time, however, those companies are contributing to the ever-growing problem of e-mail saturation. With more e-mails competing for attention, marketers have to work harder than ever to prevent their messages from being thoughtlessly deleted – or worse, prompting an opt-out.”
Avoid contributing to inbox glut by creating a formula for testing and experimentation. Apply science to your e-mail campaigns, and watch your customer yield grow.
