Working in email can sometimes seem like a thankless task sending out millions of emails to millions of people in the hope a small fraction of the receivers open them and then a small fraction of those openers actually click and buy something. Yes you can simplify email marketing down to something as basic as blast and pray but understanding your campaign report information allows you to make informed changes and decisions to improve your email it not only makes your job easier but makes your time as an email marketeer more rewarding. Start with what you know Email marketeers should be using campaign reports to make informed decisions about their campaigns. If you’re not making decisions based off your…
Email testing
A robust testing process for email campaigns
Email testing is vital. Anyone who has worked in email for any length of time knows that sending an email with a mistake is not only embarrassing for you and the client but potentially a large financial risk. Terms and conditions might not be legally binding or worse, you might even lose the client. As the saying goes though people do make mistakes, everybody does. In this article I’m going to quickly run through a solid email testing plan which hopefully will help you know what you should look out for when coding. 1. Get everything tidied up Once you have the HTML and plain text version ready, save everything. Everything from the Photoshop file with the slices, the brief,…
Testing times
When we ask email marketing folks what testing they do when sending email campaigns, the list is usually pretty short. In fact, it’s often limited to subject lines and list segmentation. Whilst segmenting your list is probably the number one type of testing you should be doing, there are many other tests you can do to get a solid understanding of how well your email marketing is doing and where there is room to improve. Start by clearly defining what you want to achieve and set benchmarks so you can keep track of where you are along the way. Typical KPIs are opens, clicks, purchases and revenue. You should also define who you want to test various elements to and…