Posts Tagged ‘Email testing’
Posted by Dave McCue on March 14th, 2012
What is your initial reaction to this stock photo?
- I trust him, he’s confident
- I don’t trust him, he’s arrogant
- Someone should punch him
Cast your vote |
The Stock Photography Conundrum
Almost anyone who works in design or marketing has faced the challenge of selecting effective stock photography to use as part of print or online materials. On occasion, it is possible to find the perfect image to complement your message, but all too often the result is a cliché or simply doesn’t add much value.
Something Different
For marketers who don’t have a tangible product, this can be a real challenge. How do you graphically represent “consulting services” without resorting to one of the usual “business people conducting business” images that are out there?
One strategy to avoid the same old is to be less literal with the images. Rather than showing pretend business people pretending to consult, look for an image that conveys the transfer of creativity, such as a paintbrush against a canvas. It’s difficult to make definitive statements around this topic because the audience of different verticals (or even different brands within the same vertical) can be very different in the way they interact with content, but it can be safely said that you’re missing an opportunity when the same stock image used to convey the value of your services is being used by another company offering the same services.
Adding Value to Emails
The limited real estate of an email message is no place for extraneous images. One of the most important benefits that images provide is a higher degree of scanability when it comes to email messages. Often, they can be used to separate unrelated elements of a message (product promotions, upcoming events, latest news) to make it clear to the reader/scanner that there is something else to see if they aren’t immediately drawn in by the first lines of text. Even in these instances where the images serve as a component of message layout, they should be carefully considered.
Ideas for Testing
Searching around the web can turn up various studies related to web users’ response to different types of images. As noted above, however, such findings are not necessarily relevant to your business or your audience. Instead, use these ideas to guide a test (or series of tests) on your emails, landing pages, etc. Do your emails drive more clicks with stock photography, custom graphics, or no graphics at all? What impact do different images have on your landing page, and are you seeing an effect on conversion rate? Lastly, ask colleagues or (preferably) people outside of your organization how they feel about the stock images you plan to use, and take their feedback to heart. You might find that “young-businessman.jpg” doesn’t just sound generic, but he rings hollow with message recipients as well.
Posted by John Reynolds on January 23rd, 2012
Reaching your Gmail subscriber’s inbox is critical. Even more important is that your message renders the way you want it to. All of it! If your HTML is more than 102 kilobytes, your email may be cut off by Gmail in mid-sentence. As an email marketer you may focus on the top half of your message, but at the bottom of your message are the tracking image used to record Opens/Renders and the unsubscribe link you need to be CAN-SPAM compliant.
Gmail will automatically clip a message if the total size exceeds 102 kilobytes. Users will see a [Message Clipped] View Entire Message link in order to download the rest of your message (see screenshot below). In Gmail’s smart phone and tablet apps, the same rules generally apply.
To fix this situation, keep your HTML code short by removing extra returns, comments and unnecessary attributes and styles. Applications like Outlook and Apple Mail will show you the size of your message if you’re looking for ways to test. You can also check your file size from an original HTML text file.
Aside from the HTML code, it is also recommended that you save your images in an optimized format. Recipients should not have to wait for the images to render on their desktop or smart phone.
Continue to test how your messages render. It is critical that your message renders properly in Gmail to avoid losing the unsubscribe link, tracking image for Opens/Renders , and any content that is displayed after 102 kilobytes.
Posted by Rob Ropars on August 26th, 2011
We’ve all heard that if you’re in marketing, in particular email marketing, you should constantly be testing to maximize results. The most common test mentioned is the ubiquitous “A/B” split test, meaning a 50/50 list split to test one variable against another (graphics, copy, offer, layout, list, time of day, day of week, etc.).
But is an A/B test all you can or should do? If you have only a few thousand or fewer emails to work with, an A/B test may be all you can do to ensure statistically reliable results. However, if your list is too small, an A/B test might not make any sense. For example, if you only have a few hundred email addresses, splitting and conducting one test will literally tell you nothing (statistically) other than directionally relevant information. Instead you may need to try to replicate the test over time, to aggregate the results and to analyze your collective data over a longer period.
The first consideration is to quantify how many email addresses you need to test to ensure you have a representative sample and more importantly, to ensure the results are reliable. There is a lot of math and science behind this topic, and fortunately a lot of math/science/statistics sites have free online tools such as this one.
You must set up the test(s) correctly (with sufficient sample sizes and assumed response rates) on the front end to ensure that results on the back end are reliable, meaning with a confidence level that you’re comfortable with (we recommend a 95% confidence level if it’s possible). Again, there are resources online to assist such as this one. The key is to avoid the common mistake of merely looking at results and assuming winners/losers based on seemingly different response rates.
Before testing, you have to identify the goal or the question you’re trying to answer. We recommend that you actually write these down and then, as briefly and concisely as possible, describe the various yardsticks you will use to determine your winner. As form follows function, the goals/objectives of the test coupled with the means to measure results should help drive copy, graphics, and/or layout to ensure the messages are properly structured and focused on whatever question you’re trying to answer..
Let’s say your goal is a higher click rate and after an A/B test you find “A” has a 2.7% CTR and “B” has 2.85%. It is a common mistake to use subtraction and declare that “B” was the winner or that “B” was only 0.15% higher and that could lead you down the path of thinking it wasn’t a significant result (i.e. a virtual “tie”). Or maybe you routinely just pick the higher percentage as the winner and run with that. Using proper percent increase/decrease calculations, we find that this is actually a 5.56% increase from “A” to “B.”
That however may or may not be statistically significant, but as you can see it’s a much larger increase than originally assumed. In order to determine if the results are statistically significant, use one of the calculators, plug in each version’s list size and the click percentage (or open percentage, or conversion rate, etc. depending on the key metric you’re analyzing) and it will instantly tell you whether this difference is enough to be reliable (with a 95% confidence level).
In this example, let’s pretend I sent “A” and “B” to a random 2,000 people each. The calculations indicate that this would not be enough of a difference to be statistically reliable. In fact, the “B” cell’s click rate would have to have been at least 3.81% in order for the difference to be reliably significant. However, if you didn’t analyze the results properly you wouldn’t know this.
The other way to ensure you’re maximizing your results is to avoid doing a full scale A/B test. If your database for an email marketing campaign is large enough (again calculate minimum sample size), you can do a different kind of split test. First, split your list 10%/90% (ensuring it’s random). Then split the 10% group in half so you have two small splits and the remaining 90%.
Deploy your test to the 10% splits, give as much time as possible for activity to occur (twenty-four hours if possible), analyze the results and then deploy the winner to the remaining 90%. That way you’ve done your best to maximize the campaign’s results without going “all in” on a typical full file A/B split.
As with gambling, learn the rules, do the math, analyze the data and place your bets. Do it right, and the odds will swing in your favor.
Posted by Rob Ropars on July 6th, 2011
Email marketers know the dreaded apprehension in the moments before a campaign deploys. You find yourself going through a mental checklist of items (much like a pilot about to take off), and you stress over each detail. Did I pick the right email list? Is the subject line correct? Typos can be especially memorable for all the wrong reasons — just ask the road crew in North Carolina that spelled “School” incorrectly outside of a local high school.
Because email is such a fast medium of communication, messages can reach recipients within seconds to minutes after you hit the send button. I’ve often found that if there was an error in the email, I’m most likely to detect it within the first 1-2 minutes after it’s left its gate.
Proofreading is a critical piece of any marketing campaign, regardless of whether it involves direct mail, email or both. Social Media affords a more relaxed style of communication, and a lower standard of writing is often used. Professional marketers should try to avoid falling into conversational speech when updating blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter. I mean OMG people!
There are key things to remember when proofreading your marketing pieces:
- Read it out loud – you will find errors your brain skips over when reading to yourself.
- Let someone else read it – we’ve all heard about missing the forest for the trees-sometimes you’re just too close to the material and have seen it too many times.
- Watch out for common spelling mistakes – here are some words that are often used in email marketing, client metric reviews/consultations, blog posts and strategic presentations.
- acquire
- accommodate
- bellwether
- calendar
- exceed
- hierarchy
- its/it’s
- liaison
- misspell
- noticeable
- occasionally
- occurrence
- precede
- principal/principle
- questionnaire
- receive/receipt
- recommend
- relevant
- separate
- site/sight
- than v. then
- their/there/they’re
- to/too
- threshold
- vacuum
Occasionally a misspelled word will sneak through. It’s not usually the end of the world, but some occurrences are so noticeable that they supersede the marketing message itself. No one wants their campaign to be remembered for a mistake. So I would always recommend that proofreading be a core principle of any marketing effort preceding deployment.
We’re all busy and you may lack the resources to proofread your work internally in a timely fashion. Your liaison at your Email Service Provider can often accommodate your needs or recommend a proofing site such as ProofreadNOW (www.proofreadnow.com) to help to ensure that your marketing campaigns remain out of sight and exceed expectations.
Posted by Nic Winters on February 17th, 2011
When collaborating with clients on their email marketing strategy, the team at SubscriberMail regularly focuses on different methods of testing email campaigns. However, testing can be fruitless without an understanding of your results!
After the deployment of a campaign, users can pull a bevy of data-rich reports that identify percentages related to clicks, renders, etc. But for users more involved in the reporting process and less involved in message creation, clearly interpreting the differences in results for A/B tests related to design or content changes can be difficult without a visual representation of the messages themselves.
To help assist those that have been outside of the in-depth design/construction of the email tests, we urge our clients to utilize our Click Overlay Report to help visualize which items in the message have generated the most click activity (as click data is displayed in callout bubbles over the actual design of the email).
Contact the SubscriberMail Client Support team at support@subscribermail.com for more information regarding how you can visualize email results with the SubscriberMail Click Overlay Report.
